Choosing a faith

Is it whining when Trump and others on the right complain for years that they are victims of the deep state, the mainstream media, social media outlets, rigged elections, a Democratic House, a Democratic Justice Department, the FBI, liberal judges and Antifa?Other things being equal, any large group of people is going to be just like any other large group of people with regard to personal characteristics like degree of whininess or a victim mentality.--Percy

I don't think telegenic's the right word. Maybe you mean apophenia or pareidolia? Why must life have a purpose? Maybe it just is.
​ It would never occur to me to worship anything. Seems to me that an intelligence of any worth would tell people attempting to worship it to please just stop.--Percy

My position on "Must life have a purpose?" is actually "I don't know." I was just asking you to explain why life must have a purpose.Consider the possibility that there was once microbial life on Mars a few billion years ago that went extinct as the planet dried up and its atmosphere escaped into space. Would that life have had a purpose?Or what if there had been no asteroid 66 million years ago with the result that dinosaurs still ruled the Earth, pterosaurs still ruled the sky, plesiosaurs still ruled the seas, mammals were still small and relegated to underground niches, and intelligent life had never evolved. Would that life have a purpose? Morality is fundamental to your point. What is moral? Isn't morality relative? If I'm recalling your recent discussion with Tangle correctly, he pointed out that what you're calling worshipful behavior is just being a decent person, and I resent your contention that I'm behaving worshipfully when I behave decently. "Worship" has multiple definitions, but the one that is appropriate for this thread is "reverence or adoration of a deity." None of the definitions of worship is "behaving decently." We understand your point perfectly, but you're misusing the word.Also, by employing that definition you imply that by behaving decently we're actually engaging in worship that demonstrates evidence of God. I resent attempts like this to involuntarily include us in the God club by in essence saying, "You may say you don't believe in God, but your behavior says you not only believe in him but worship him."Bottom line: behaving decently is not a form of worship.--Percy

WWJD? You have to ask? Render unto Caesar. Borders would mean nothing to Jesus. We are all God's children. Border's are Godless and artificial constructions of men. Wasn't Jesus confusing about family? In one of the gospels didn't he tell his disciples to reject family?Anyway, the answer is obvious. You must with regret attend to the needs of your family before the needs of others.But I think the US can afford to let a few million desperate people into the country. We already let in roughly a million a year, so upping it to two or three million for a few consecutive years isn't going to hurt. They already get in illegally anyway. It would be foolish to think that migrants reach the border, see the walls and border patrols and the river, then return to Honduras or wherever. They try and try and try, getting better at it each time and finding more savvy and reliable collaborators, and eventually they succeed.If I were trying to get into the US illegally I would go to Tijuana or Ensenada or maybe Matamores on the other coast and rent a boat because the coastline has numerous inlets and few patrols. Googling this I see it's becoming a more common method.What makes people question your Christian charity is that you don't seem to care about the people clamoring at our borders. You just want them to go away, and whatever the government has to do to make that happen seems to be fine with you.--Percy

Sure, we agree as far as individuals finding purpose in life. But I was thinking more broadly, as you sort of allude to here: Does mankind have a purpose? Does life? It's 1850. You make a great personal sacrifice to provide your daughter's family a slave. Moral?Morality is hopelessly relative. There are no general criteria for defining what is moral. Uh, yes, I said it was Tangle. You quoted me saying it. I didn't recall the exact phrase "behaving decently," but I said it was Tangle: "If I'm recalling your recent discussion with Tangle correctly, he pointed out that what you're calling worshipful behavior is just being a decent person..."You say you don't agree with what I say you believe, but I quoted your own words saying that that's exactly what you believe. Here it is again from your Message 1836: This is what Tangle called behaving decently, and you're claiming that by behaving decently "we worship God." I resent and reject that claim. I can't believe you're denying you said this, because you say it yet again in this message: You're actually serving the flying spaghetti monster, whether or not you believe in His existence. Well, if CS Lewis says it then it must be true.--Percy

Obviously someone back then found human sacrifice and cannibalism appealing.--Percy

Were you trying to say "in their life and times"? Anyway, I think I get your meaning. But that is not your "only point", because you go on to address "ultimate purpose," which is exactly what I was talking about: You can't even be consistent for two consecutive sentences. I don't know if you're doing this on purpose or if it comes naturally, but you are being incredibly aggravating by repeatedly arguing that an intelligence must have created life but never addressing the infinite regression that I keep asking you about. This will be the fourth time I'm asking. What about the infinite regression? And not to distract you, but here's another question: Do you even care if your answers make sense, because you don't seem to? Based on what evidence? You really think one follows from the other? This actually seems like a rational chain of logic to you? Wow!The truth is that if life has a purpose then the flying spaghetti monster exists. You are making the same mistake being made by groups all across the continent, judging people of the past by the standards of today. You can't judge what is moral by whether it is a social norm because social norms change, and even people living in the same place in the same time period don't agree on what is a social norm anyway. What you think moral today could be judged immoral by people in the future, or even by people today in a different social and/or cultural and/or geographical group.Morality is hopelessly relative. If you're familiar with the bell-shaped curve, the quality of treatment of slaves would have followed a bell-shaped curve. Of course some slave owners treated them well. By mathematical necessity that must be true. But treating slaves well doesn't transform slavery into a net good, so why did you say that? Do even you know? What constitutes "the expense of another human being?" By your standard haven't women been treated immorally throughout time right up to the present? Some people in this country even think it's moral to require a women to give birth to the child of the man who raped her because they believe a zygote is a living human being. The expense (to use your term) to the woman is immense but it is still judged moral by a significant portion of the country.A lot of your answers begin with "I believe this" or "I believe that." You can stop with those kinds of answers because we already have a pretty good idea of what you believe. What you don't do is provide any substantive arguments in support of what you believe. Yeah, I have a point, and here's another point, which I'll phrase as a question. Why does it take several exchanges to get extremely basic and obvious points across to you? Are you stupid? Or do you get some kind of insipid pleasure from wasting other people's time? This discussion is progressing at a snail's pace and is extremely repetitive, and that's all your doing. There you go again with "I believe." Enough with the "I believe." You have "I believed" us to death. It isn't my definition. It is *the* definition. There are others, but that's the one relevant to this discussion. Maybe that's not what you're saying now, but that's exactly what you were saying before for message after message. Again, not my definition. It's the standard definition. I'm fine with wide latitude on word usage, but not on redefining words. The definition of worship is not "loving our neighbor and caring for other lifeforms and the planet," which is what you've been pushing the past so many messages. Believe whatever you like, just understand that not everyone worships any god, and that just because they're "behaving decently" doesn't transform them into god-worshipping acolytes. Oh, sure, "general Christian belief." Like you all believe that salvation is achieved through works and not through faith, right? And you all believe that symbolically drinking the blood and eating the flesh of Christ is an essential part of worship, right?You said that the original point of this thread is that the nature of the god we worship matters. This has already been disproven pretty thoroughly once it was pointed out that a higher percentage of god fearing Christians commit crimes than atheists, and that atheists are at least as capable of good works as Christians. You say Christianity makes you a better person, but where Christianity goes wrong is to extrapolate this into a belief that Christianity would make everyone a better person, and as I've repeatedly pointed out, that attitude has been a source of constant and relentless evil over millennia.I provided the example of the Canadian treatment of the First Nation peoples, and you argued that that was then, as if you're more enlightened now. No, you're not. You're just as blissfully unaware of the evils you're committing in the name of God as your predecessors were.Let's go to a Christian message that hasn't received much attention in this thread so far, that we're all sinners. If you think you always know when you're sinning then you're wrong. Many of your sins won't come to light until later, probably much later. You should stop patting yourself on the back for how much good Christianity has enabled you to perform. You might think you're doing good, but sometimes you are and sometimes you're not. And if you think you're doing good but you're not, are you really worshipping God?--Percy

In a mild coincidence, I just came across a perfect example of doing evil in the name of good in the Washington Post article World’s largest body of human geneticists apologizes for eugenics role. The article was subtitled, "The American Society for Human Genetics (ASHG) examined its past and the racism of some geneticists."What did they do in the name of good? Their highest annual award was until now named for an early 20th century geneticist who "promoted sterilizations of individuals with undesirable traits." The organization focused study on those of European descent to the exclusion of other races. Another area of study was driven by concern that "those who could pass as White would pollute the White gene pool..." Some of the early leaders of the ASHG were also leaders in the American Eugenics Society. Some ASHG presidents promoted forced sterilization of the genetically unfit. The organization as a whole was too often "silent about unethical genetic research," for example that "Black people were intellectually inferior due to their genetics."Why did they do all this? To prevent future unborn generations from suffering unnecessarily from adverse characteristics and conditions transmitted genetically. Such a noble goal, yet look at the evils perpetrated by pursuit of that goal.But your own religious conceit prevents you from incorporating such possibilities into your thinking. "No, no, no," you think, "we're the good guys, we're enlightened, we've learned from the mistakes of those who came before us."Yeah, yeah, yeah, they all thought that.--Percy

The discussion has chanced upon a subtlety that is worth clarifying. Scientists try to keep in mind that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so I want to be clear that Stile isn't making that mistake.Let me use the example of hide-and-seek to clarify. Your friend hides and you begin looking for him. You looked in the closet and he wasn't there. Based upon the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" stricture you might be tempted to say that you have no evidence he's in the closet, which is true, and that therefore you have no evidence that he's not in the closet, which is not true because you looked in the closet. He wasn't there, and that is evidence that he's not in the closet. You absolutely have evidence of absence from the closet.You then thoroughly search the rest of the house (every nook, cranny and crawlspace) and he's not there. That's evidence of absence from the house. He must be hiding somewhere outside. And so forth. The entire history of human experience of the divine has been one of retreat. God used to be behind everything. Rain, drought, lightning, earthquakes, floods, storms, life, love, death, an endless list, it was all controlled by gods or God, and He was everywhere.What does God control now, and where is he? The answers seem to be that he controls only that which science hasn't explained yet, and that he's somewhere where science hasn't looked yet or can't look. And he seems to be remarkably averse to scientific equipment.About whether people who claim experiences of God or Jesus are lying, I wouldn't say. But you asked the question, so let me turn the question back on you and ask whether you believe someone who claims experiences of the sun god or Zeus or Jehovah or Allah or nirvana or Krishna is lying? Or is it perhaps just the nature of religious practice that causes people to have what we would normally call a religious experience? Without looking this up, it seems a pretty safe bet that the psychology field has ways of measuring empathy and love. Just now looked it up anyway. Check out The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire - PMC, for just one example. Or check out Measuring the Capacity to Love: Development of the CTL-Inventory, for another example.Does it never occur to you to check whether something you're about to say in ignorance is true? But let's say that you're right, that one cannot with confidence judge empathy and love. If scientists cannot gauge it objectively, and if people of the Lord can only have faith in the answer, then doesn't that tell us pretty clearly that no one has any evidence?And where did you come up with (paraphrasing), "The existence of empathy and love is evidence of God." There are two problems with this. You've just claimed it isn't possible to objectively judge empathy and love, that you can only "believe" it (adding one more to your "I believe" claims). And where is the chain of logic showing that the existence of empathy and love implies that God exists? You are once again reduced to "I believe." Could you please cut it out with the "I believes." Saying "I believe" carries no weight if that's all you've got. You're preaching, not discussing. No, the same does not hold for both us and you. It only holds for you. What you're doing is making claims without evidence. All we're doing is telling you your claims are worthless without evidence. We're making no claims of our own other than to say you have no evidence. You've conceded that you have no evidence a number of times, but you continue your search for a way of claiming to have evidence that we can't show wrong. Give it up. Just because no evidence survived of some event of history does not mean it didn't happen. It just means no evidence survived. It also means we can never know about it.When you say you "believe that Jesus' resurrection was historically true" I think what you actually mean is that you still believe there is evidence for it. Still pinning your hopes on Tacitus, Suetonius, et. al., I assume. No one's saying you shouldn't believe this. No one's saying that this belief is wrong. But if you begin to again repeat your claims of evidence for a caring deity ("hey, empathy and love, there's your evidence") then we'll quickly point out the flaws in your thinking. However, if you're only saying, "I believe in God," then fine, you believe in God. Nobody's got a problem with that. The only thing we have a problem with is when you claim you have evidence of God, and not just of God generally but specifically of the God of Christianity Because of tentativity there is nothing in science that we know absolutely, so when you say that things can be true without absolutely knowing that they're true, realize that there is nothing that we absolutely know. Consider it an ideal that can never be achieved.Evidence never tells us that something is absolutely true. It only tells us what is likely true about the real world. And, of course, unsupported belief tells us nothing.If God is part of the real world, we have no evidence of that. That doesn't mean he doesn't exist, but it does put him in the realm of all other things that have no evidence, like unicorns, elves, fairies, and the flying spaghetti monster. We know that there is no God (i.e., atheism) in the same way that we know there are no unicorns, elves, fairies, or flying spaghetti monster: absence of any supporting evidence. Adding to the doubts of His reality is the wealth of contradictory claims (i.e., the great number of different religions), which is what always happens when something has no evidence. Is that really how you translate what we've been telling you in your mind? How can you still have it so wrong?Evidence of natural origins for anything, such as morality, is not evidence against God. It is evidence of a natural origin that contradicts your claims of divine origins that lack all evidence. You're completely misconstruing what Stile is saying.Let me try another tack. Say there's someone who is absolutely convinced that unicorns exist, or at least that unicorns once existed. He searches for evidence for decades but never finds any. How should this failure to find any evidence affect his belief in unicorns?Now consider someone who is absolutely convinced that God exists. He searches for evidence for decades but never finds any. How should this failure to find any evidence affect his belief in God?Shouldn't the failure to find evidence affect his assessment of the probability that his hypothesis is correct, whether it's about the existence of unicorns or God? First, no it isn't the same type of evidence. There isn't a single scientific study of the evidence for the existence of the divine, because there's no evidence to study.Second, every religion that has ever existed has had a period of increasing belief. Christianity is not unique in this respect. That there was a period of "rise of Christian belief" is not evidence of the truth of Christianity, any more than the rise of belief in Judaism was evidence of the truth of Judaism, or the rise of belief in Islam was evidence of the truth of Islam, or the rise in belief of ghosts (occurred in the 19th century) was evidence of the existence of ghosts, or the rise of belief in UFOs (occurred in the 20th century) was evidence of the existence of UFOs.To state it succinctly, a period of increasing belief in something is not evidence of the truth of that something.A word about the nature of evidence. Think of evidence as a verifiable fact, then enumerate in your mind the verifiable facts for God and Jesus. This should be a relatively quick task as there are none. As I said earlier, morality is hopelessly relative. Even murder, which everyone agrees is wrong, is relative. Murder is wrong, unless you live in a jurisdiction with capital punishment, in which case it's okay. Murder is wrong, unless you're a combatant in war, in which case it's okay. Murder is wrong, unless you're getting rid of an inferior race like Jews in Europe or Bosnians in Bosnia or Tutsis in Rwanda, then it's okay.If even the wrongness of something as heinous as murder is relative, then how could anyone argue that any moral quality isn't relative?But getting back on point, morality most certainly fits within an evolutionary framework. To stick with your introduction of the popular vernacular of "survival of the fittest," morality evolved because it made populations more fit in the struggle for survival. It conferred a survival advantage upon human populations. Morality isn't defined as a thought. It's a behavior, just like animals marking their territory is a behavior. They're both inherent behaviors. Instinctual. I think you'll find wide agreement that human behavior is infinitely varied, but what is this "vast range of human morality" you refer to? If you only mean that what is moral varies across time and geography then I absolutely agree. What is moral in one time and place in not moral another. That's because morality is hopelessly relative. You mean questions like, "If atheists are wrong about God, why do they appear to live more moral lives than Christians?" Questions like that? I have only one question for theism: Where's the evidence?--Percy

Actually, you don't give answers. What you do is provide statements of belief in response to requests for evidence or requests to support your claims of evidence. Most recently you're claiming that love, morality and empathy are evidence of the divine because there is no natural explanation for them, a claim made in ignorance, and when informed of the evidence for natural origins instead of addressing them you issued another statement of belief.In essence you're saying, "I'm ignoring the evidence and believing this anyway," which is fine, we insist on your freedom to hold whatever religious beliefs you choose without criticism. But then within a couple messages you're back to claiming evidence, and we're back to saying, "What evidence?" You've just put the discussion right back where it started, and around and around we go.You provide an example of how you don't answer questions right here. I asked about the infinite regression, and you reply on an entirely different topic: Where in this "answer" do you address the question about the infinite regression? I'll ask again, for the fifth time. If an intelligence such as ourselves can only be created by an intelligence, what created that first intelligence? If you're correct that an intelligence can only be created by another intelligence, then mustn't it have been created by some other intelligence? And mustn't that intelligence also have been created by another intelligence? And so on ad infinitum? That's the infinite regression, and you still haven't addressed it.And you claim that many physicists accept that God is in a different dimension or universe. That's highly unlikely. More than half of physicists are atheists.It is only the mathematics of physics that has no arrow of time. Entropy provides the arrow. I'm sure Greene mentions it. You might be reading Brian Greene, but you sure aren't understanding him. Here's a Brian Greene quote from a Time interview:

quote:

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My feeling is that the reductionist, materialist, physicalist approach to the world is the right one. There isn't anything else; these grand mysteries will evaporate over time.

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Rather than feeling, ‘Damn, there’s no universal morality,’ ‘Damn, there’s no universal consciousness,' how wondrous is it that I am able to have this conscious experience and it’s nothing more than stuff? That stuff can produce Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, that stuff can produce the Mona Lisa, that stuff can produce Romeo and Juliet? Holy smokes, that’s wondrous.
  —Brian Greene

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Thank you for providing a perfect example of what you've doing over and over again. I asked you for evidence, and you replied with a statement of belief. You do this as a means of deflection because you know we're fine with whatever you want to believe religiously, and that if you respond with a statement of belief that we'll let the issue drop.But then later, a couple messages from now, you'll state that empathy, morality and love are evidence of the divine, or maybe you'll introduce something else you think is evidence, but in any case you'll continue this oscillation between "it's just a belief" in one message followed by "I have evidence for what I believe" in another. And now you're back to 'The Bible is evidence'. We've been over this, I'm not going to rehash it.And, of course, subjective feelings are useless as evidence. I think that if you look up nihilism you'll find that my beliefs are not nihilistic. There you go again, a statement of belief when evidence is what's required. You go on to say: I provided a counterexample to this already. You're response was hopelessly muddled. It's the 1850s. At great sacrifice to yourself you provide a slave to your daughter's family. How is that moral?Here's your attempted answer: Let's say that you treat your slaves sumptuously and extravagantly. You still own them. They're only in your household because they're your property. How does treating them incredibly well become moral while holding them as property?Let's go to a similar example. You kidnap someone. You keep them in your house, you feed them very well, provide them regular exercise, give them their own room, access to TV channels and streaming, provide them books, audio books, art on the walls and an Amazon account where they can order whatever they want. How does all this wonderful treatment become something moral while holding them as a kidnapping victim? Today it is. Many yesterdays ago it wasn't. It was a legitimate and respected pathway to a better life. The Bible was used by the religious all across the South to justify slavery. Morality is hopelessly relative across time and geography. Yes, I do, and that was an appropriate response to your pile of "I believe" responses in the face of requests for evidence. Which has been called to your attention a number of times. And which you're obviously ignoring. As Jefferson said (paraphrasing), ridicule is the appropriate response to incoherent propositions. But I wasn't attempting ridicule. I was hoping to get you to finally see that your claims about God and Jesus are evidence free (which you don't accept) in the same way that claims about the flying spaghetti monster are evidence free (which you do accept).If you were not from Canada but from another part of the world where Islam rules you would still be arguing just as determinedly as you are now, but for Islam. You're arguing for Christianity in this manner not because Christianity is actually true but simply because arguing for your religious beliefs is in your nature and Christianity happens to be the dominant religion where you live and perhaps you were even raised in it and so it is the religion that holds sway within your mind. Your reasons lack all evidence. This hits upon the key point. We'd be delighted if you only stated what you believe, but you do more than that. You continually add that you have evidence for your beliefs. When challenged you back off and say it's only a statement of what you believe, but within a very short time you're back to claiming evidence for your beliefs, like your "morality/empathy/love must have a divine origin" claim, or your, "life could only have come from a cosmic intelligence" claim. It isn't your word choice that is the problem. The problem is your continual bait and switch, oscillating between "this is only a belief" and "there is evidence for this belief." Nobody anywhere can claim absolute knowledge of anything. There's no soft evidence, either, and there's a lot of evidence against. Undoubtedly somewhere in the world someone is advancing the exact same kind of arguments you are, but for Islam or Judaism or Hinduism or Buddhism or Mormonism. The religion changes but the arguments stay the same. I thought it was common knowledge, but let me Google it for you.If you check out Are Prisoners Less Likely To Be Atheists? | FiveThirtyEight you'll see that atheists are .1% of the prison population but .7% of the general population. They are 7 times less likely to be incarcerated relative to their proportion of the population. Protestants are about 1.6 times less likely, Catholics just as likely.Here's another article making the same point for Federal prisons: In 2021, atheists made up only 0.1% of the federal prison population. "More significantly, it means our presence in U.S. federal prisons is significantly lower than what we find in the general population." He estimates the number of atheists in the general population as 4%, but this seems high. According to a ARIS 2008 poll, 2% are atheist and 10% are agnostic, and while that poll's a bit dated now and both populations have increased, it seems unlikely that the percentage of atheists could have doubled in just 15 years.
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--Percy

I'm not looking for a deity at all. In your own search, if you're not looking for a deity in the physical world then where are you looking for him? You exist in the physical world, so unless you're claiming some connection to the spiritual world the only place you can look for a deity is the physical world. Hearts and minds and expressions of altruism, empathy love, and devotion to others all exist in the physical world. No one has ever observed anything outside the physical world. No one has a problem with you believing that these things are expressions of God. But if you want to show that they're actual evidence of God then you have a long ways to go. One place you could start would be by showing how they're evidence of the Christian God but not of Allah or Zeus or Vishnu or Moroni. You're kinda leaving me speechless here with how badly you've lost the plot concerning a simple point. You claimed that empathy and love can't be measured in Message 1866: But I rebutted this by providing links demonstrating that the field of psychology has questionnaires and inventories that measure empathy and love, thereby showing your claim was incorrect. Proof of existence of methods of measuring these things was all that was required, and the links did that all by themselves. The actual details of the methods was not what we were discussing. You never made any claims about the psychological inventories, didn't even know they existed, so why in the world would you think I should construct arguments about them? How far out into left field are you going to roam?And does it really never occur to you to look something up before saying something in ignorance? Still no chain of logic nor any evidence. You just keep repeating this baseless claim in various ways. How is an analogy evidence? In any case, all the evidence we have says we evolved naturally and were not constructed. Have you considered that maybe evolution was God's means of creation? Stated another way, maybe God didn't create life in a spasm of creation but instead created abiogenesis and evolution. Repeating myself for the umpteenth time, no one has any problem with what you believe. The problem is that you respond to requests for evidence you claim exists with expressions of belief. It is when you do that that I complain about all the "I believes."You do that over and over again. When called out for it you respond as if you don't really understand the complaint, somehow interpreting protests as if they were objections to your beliefs. This could not be further from the truth, and I don't understand why you don't get it because our complaints about this have not been vague or ambiguous. On the contrary, they've been specific and persistent, but you keep doing it anyway. If you're trying to be annoying then you are succeeding. And if you're sincere then I am thoroughly perplexed by your lack of self-awareness of what you are doing.Can we somehow break you out of this loop you're in of, "I believe this, but I have no evidence, but what I really mean is that I have no evidence that you guys accept, but I believe it is evidence, but you guys don't accept it so I can only say that this is something I believe." You don't say it all at once as I do here but string it out over a couple or few messages and then repeat it ad infinitum. I'll say it again just to try to increase the probability that the point gets across. No one cares what you believe. It's that you claim to have evidence for what you believe, and then when asked for that evidence you instead respond with a statement of belief. And you do it again and again. As I explained previously in the thread, except in one case that I'll get to, there is no essential difference between ordinary evidence and scientific evidence. What is different is how it is studied. You look out the window and say, "I see it is raining." That's ordinary evidence. Your neighbor has a rain gauge, so his observations can be a bit more scientific.The exception is that some evidence can only be scientific, never ordinary. Rain is ordinary evidence that can be studied scientifically, but evidence of the Higgs boson can only be scientific. There is no ordinary way to obtain such evidence.Is this clear, or will I find myself having to say this again within another hundred messages? Does what you believe is evidence change, too? Apparently you understand that science has changed how people perceive gods and God. God used to move mountains, now he just moves emotions. God has retreated to realms where he can never be seen but only emoted and never evidenced. Well, concerning God and Jesus, which is it, evidence or faith? You can't have it both ways. We don't want you to do it again. We want you to move the discussion forward by responding to our rebuttals of your claims of evidence. But you won't do that. You seem to think that what you've said is all that need be said and refuse to say more, instead retreating into "I believe this," implying that you believe it on faith. But that's not true. You're not being forthright with your "I believes" because what you believe isn't based upon faith but upon a belief that there is evidence behind your beliefs. If your evidence is so great then use it to convince devout Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and Jews that the Christian God is the one, right and true God. These devout believers have the same standards for evidence that you do, so it should be easy, right? No problem, right? What is "philosophical and theological evidence?" You're making up red herrings. There is only evidence. Evidence enters our brains through the senses. There are only five of them: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste. There is no special category of evidence labeled "philosophical and theological." If it can't be seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted then it isn't evidence. And even that cannot be known absolutely. Consider the "brain in a beaker" and "life as a simulation" scenarios. You're misstating this. Having evidence of how behaviors evolve is far superior to having no evidence of a behavior's divine origin. Evidence is always superior to no evidence. One guy looking from one vantage point for a few days is not comparable to a decades long investigation, but your avoiding the question. Shouldn't the failure to find evidence of something you think exists affect your assessment of the likelihood that it actually exists? An answer of no means you believe evidence doesn't matter. Instead of answering my question you're posing your own and answering that instead. I said nothing about looking for God behind the barn. I describe a decades long quest for evidence.And the reality is far more profound than that. The reality is that millions and millions of people are seeking God everywhere all their lives and never turning up a single shred of evidence. You keep repeating this as if it hasn't been repeatedly rebutted. Doesn't honesty demand that you follow this statement with, "Now I know you've argued that...etc...", and then describe your objections to my argument. It's called moving the discussion forward. You seemed determined to keep the discussion stuck on it's initial phases. You don't even have evidence of a "pre-existing intelligence," let alone that it was responsible for "conscious life," or even unconscious life for that matter (e.g., algae). Well, as I said, God is remarkably averse to scientific apparatus. But more importantly, you won't find God in church, either. Morality is a behavior, and all behavior is driven by the brain. The heart pumps blood. Morality is not a "heart thing." How is this any different than "Morality is hopelessly relative?" But that's all you ever do is contend or believe. You never evidence. Morality and marking territory are both instinctive behaviors driven by the brain. You're about to contend without evidence again. You are correct that there is a learning aspect to morality, but the basics are instinctual. Without being taught we know from a very young age that hurting others is wrong, stealing is wrong, lying is wrong. But aspects of morality are also cultural, temporal, geographical and so can be learned. And been rebutted numerous times. Your response is always just a statement of belief. There's never any evidence.
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--Percy

Probably some form of the term evolve is more appropriate than spread. If you're only talking about a mutation or attribute propagating through a population than spread might be an appropriate term, but not so much for evolving characteristics. How would your evidence-free explanation have anywhere near the value and utility of one with evidence? On what planet is it reasonable to argue that an evidence-free explanation is more reasonable than one without evidence? Why would I argue it? Self-preservation has to be hard-wired as a part of fitness. But it *is* more complicated than that, as I'll get to. The evolutionary explanation for self-sacrifice is to allow one's genes to make it into succeeding generations. A familiar example is the male praying mantis, who risks death at the hands of the female just for a chance to mate. Sexually experienced males are very rare in this species. Sacrificing oneself for one's offspring is another familiar example that shares this explanation. Sacrificing oneself for related individuals who have less than half your genes also has this explanation. Sacrificing oneself for unrelated individuals who make the survival of your genes more likely, such as army mates helping you protect the country in which your family lives, also has this explanation.But it's clear you're thinking of selfless sacrifice where preservation of one's genes is not a factor. This is a case where I'm not aware of how evolution may play a role, but selfless sacrifice is not unique to believers. I have no idea why Brian Greene wrote that, but he is well aware of entropy and the arrow of time. For example in the transscipt portion of Video of entropy and the arrow of time | Britannica he writes this:

Brian Greene:

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But I'm just going to really try to scratch the surface here on the deep issue of the arrow of time, and its relationship to entropy, and the second law of thermodynamics.

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You can't get an undergraduate degree in physics without learning about thermodynamics, which is why I could be so certain Brian Greene knows about entropy and the arrow of time. Perhaps further on in that book he revisits the topic of the arrow of time, or maybe he ignores entropy altogether as too complicated for his target audience for that particular book, I don't know. I've never read it.But it is a common topic for physicists to comment on when they write books for laypeople, that most equations in physics do not include an arrow of time. But if Greene's book is leaving the impression in your mind that physics cannot account for the arrow of time then trust me, that's incorrect. You began your quote with [quote] and ended it with [/qs]. The board's software detects mistakes like this when you click on preview and displays the mistake in red, as in this example here: Commenting on your excerpt from Brian Greene - Wikipedia, I think you must have misconstrued his meaning. Greene is only saying that "religion is a deeply valuable part" of human cultural history going back thousands of years that is part of what it means to be human. It doesn't provide any support at all for your views, and you're completely ignoring what the excerpt says earlier about the New Atheism movement resonating with him and feeling no need for religious explanation. Your excerpt fits under the heading of "providing both the argument and its rebuttal." Again, you've misinterpreted Greene. I grant that we can't dismiss the possibility that your deity "is not subject to time," but only because there is nothing that can be dismissed about things for which there is no evidence. Are unicorns subject to time? Who knows, there's no evidence of any kind for unicorns, same as your God. And I can't imagine why you think Greene is supportive of your evidence-free ideas.But we weren't talking about time. We were talking about the infinite regression. Again, for the sixth time, if intelligent beings such as ourselves can only come about through the agency of another intelligent being like God, then an intelligent being like God can only come about through the agency of yet another intelligent being, and that one through yet another intelligent being, and so forth forever. Without irrelevantly citing Brian Greene this time, how do get around this? Belief has nothing to do with what's real. Only hypotheses supported by evidence are worth considering. The context doesn't matter, whether science or driving or gardening or shopping or baseball, only statements based on evidence can reflect reality. Again, the word you're looking for is evolve. All evolutionary change begins with mutation and (we now know) epigenetic influences. When you say "neither view is scientific," I don't know what this other view is that you're referring to, but your view is definitely not scientific. Again, I thought this was common knowledge. I don't make things up, and I don't use biased evidence, so if you're unfamiliar with something I say then you need only ask for a reference. Here's a table from the journal Nature showing that for prominent scientists it's even worse than I said. Note the increase in disbelief over time: Maybe that's true today, but what about 200 years ago in the South? Morality is relative and differs across time, culture and geography. No doubt, but which acts are moral and which immoral depends upon the who, the when, and the where. Of course you do, but you're ignoring what I said. If you lived where Islam is the dominant religion, such as Morocco, Algeria or Iran, then you would believe that Islam is essentially true. It means you're a product of your environment. Had you been born and raised in an Islamic environment then it is Islam you would believe is "essentially true." Morocco is 99% Islamic, and if you were from there then you would think Islam essentially true, not Christianity. As I keep telling you, there is no difference between ordinary evidence and scientific evidence. The difference is in how you study the evidence. If you just look at a pond you will only see water (and lilies and algae and so forth), but put a drop of pond water under a microscope and you will see evidence of microscopic life. The evidence of that microscopic life was right before your eyes all along. It's how you study it that makes a difference. I'll get back to this in a second. Keep it in mind. Remember what you just said, that you have no evidence? With no evidence, how can you know anything about a "cosmic intelligence," including whether they exist, let alone their capabilities. How do you not see that you're just making stuff up? There's belief, and then there's belief. I believe it will be cold tomorrow based on the weather forecast and radar maps that back up the forecast. You believe that there's a cosmic intelligence based upon...nothing. I would never call your "reasons to believe" evidence, but you call them evidence all the time. I don't think this characterization of people in prison generally having lost hope is accurate. You have a history of just blabbing your inner thoughts with no attempt at seeing if they have any reality.In essence you're arguing that the high percentage of Christians in prison is due to prison conversions after losing hope, but the evidence I just cited doesn't support that. Protestants are underrepresented in prison when compared to the general population, and Catholics are about equally represented. If your surmise were true then Protestants and Catholics would both be overrepresented in prison. Congratulations on finding some of the least reliable data possible! Welcome to Marripedia! [Marripedia] is a project of the far-right evangelical FRC | Pro Marriage & Pro Life Organization in Washington DC. You won't be able to track down the statistical data supporting their claims because it doesn't exist. Yes, I know. God-addicts believe if we had more God then things would be better and many even argue for a larger role for religion in government, forgetting all the evil that has been done in the name of religion. Gun-addicts argue that more guns is the answer. Anti-abortion advocates argue that easy access to abortions is responsible for the breakdown in society.People frequently look back on what they consider an idyllic past and forget all the wrongs, like segregation, back-room abortions, Jim Crow laws, Japanese disenfranchisement and internment during WWII, and so on, and that's all you're doing. In effect you're saying, "Wasn't it great back in the day when there was less diversity and everybody believed the same thing and no one committed suicide or had a drug problem because there were no drug problems back then because Darvon and Valium are just made up."--Percy

This already has three replies, but I think it deserves another.Answering the same question you asked Tangle, I never made any decision to reject Christianity or Christian doctrine, any more than I made any such decision concerning Judaism, Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism. I'm sure that what's true for me is true for many others, that other than in discussions like this religions just don't show up on my radar.Maybe you've seen some of the criticism Phat has drawn for his vulnerability to precious metal flim-flam salesmen and emotional appeals about the gold standard. Religions are in the same category for me.About whether I think I've reached the correct conclusion, the only conclusion I've reached is that none of the world's religions have evidence, including yours. Why don't the leaders of all the sects of all the world's religions have a conference and decide what the actual truth is, then present the evidence behind their conclusions?You say the existence of love, empathy and morality tells you that there's something there. Which of the world's religions, if any, represent that "something" and why that one? Try to answer without using any form or synonym of the word "believe".--Percy