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Author | Topic: Straightforward, hard-to-answer-questions about the Bible/Christianity | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Woodsy Member (Idle past 3396 days) Posts: 301 From: Burlington, Canada Joined: |
Here, we are dealing with supernaturalism. What, on the planet, is the point in making it subject to the scientific method? There are other, and more relevant, ways to scrutinize this. But atheists somehow object...I don't get it.
OK, great, lets hear about them! What are these other ways? How are they demonstrated to be reliable?
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Woodsy Member (Idle past 3396 days) Posts: 301 From: Burlington, Canada Joined: |
So, the atheists agree that the scientific method is practically useless when it comes to understanding and verifying things in super-naturalism. Okay. Let's start with this: 1. Both atheists and theists will agree that morality is surely a major part in human life. The ability to discern good from evil right and wrong takes precedence for more people than not. (there are more theists than atheists. I do not mean to say that atheists live immoral lives, no. Just, that isn't their main focus in life, as it appears. There are other things, like self, accuracy, science, etc that occupy a much bigger part of their lives.) 2. Obviously, in our world, we do not have a universal moral code that everyone follows. Even if there are laws on paper, and more or less similar among countries, people are imperfect, to say the least, in following them. 3. Yet, we all strive to be moral. 4. We all know, for sure, that man cannot ever reach the moral standard he has set for himself. 5. In light of this, there are two possible ways out of this problem. 1) Forget morality and live your life2) Submit to an absolute, ultimate moral code 6. The absolute, universal moral code is the moral Code of God. There is no personal preference or bias in following this code. 7. Since man already knows that he is imperfect, and cannot perfectly follow God's moral code (he couldn't even his own!), there has got to be propitiation. 8. That is exactly what the Christian God offers. Propitiation. Now, if people would rather choose to throw morality and its ramifications down the drain for personal reasons, what I wrote above is perfect nonsense--farce. But for the other group who are on the lookout for moral lives, there seems to be only one way--a supernatural way. This is pretty poor stuff. Humans are social animals, and intelligent to boot. Of course they have ways to get along together (morality). There is no need to appeal to superstition to explain morality. Can't you do better than this? You claim to have non-scientific ways to study this alleged supernatural realm. Let's see something respectable. "Where's the beef?" Edited by Woodsy, : corrected spelling
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Woodsy Member (Idle past 3396 days) Posts: 301 From: Burlington, Canada Joined: |
Now assuming that you've met with God personally and are 100% sure about His existence, and how will you be able to show others that it is true that God exists?!?!?! You will find that there's not any efficient way for such a kind of truth to be conveyed among humans. Even when you are 100% sure about it, others will have to need faith either to accept or to reject what you said. To simply put, witnessing and testimony are already of the most efficient way for your truth to be conveyed. And coincidently this is what Christianity is, witnessing and testimonies. Widespread agreement is no indicator of accuracy unless it is backed up with evidence. Even if everyone agreed about something, they could still all be 100% wrong. Witnessing and testimony are not convincing. To me, they just look like a widespread scam.
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Woodsy Member (Idle past 3396 days) Posts: 301 From: Burlington, Canada Joined:
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W writes: This is pretty poor stuff. Humans are social animals, and intelligent to boot. Of course they have ways to get along together (morality). There is no need to appeal to superstition to explain morality. Can't you do better than this? You claim to have non-scientific ways to study this alleged supernatural realm. Let's see something respectable. "Where's the beef?" Umm, well now, if you would define morality as "getting along with each other", then sir, more power to you. /s I mean....where's your beef? Well, I can do without the smarmy condescension. You have still not offered any way to study this alleged supernatural realm, or even to show that it exists.
Um, yeah, that's the best I can tell you,I don't base faith on physical evidence..even if there was 100% reliable evidence for the Flood. I might say "oh look, we have physical evidence to further confirm the veracity of the Biblical account that we already believe in based on faith" but not "hey, Joe, umm...they finally discovered the Ark, so now that we have a leg to stand on in the scientific community, lets believe this Bible, shall we?..and if they contend with us, its okay bud, we have physical evidence!" If you cannot produce evidence of some convincing kind, the rest of us can dismiss your religion as a kind of disease of the intellect and ignore it as far a the public sphere is concerned. If religion cannot be shown to be true to people not already committed to it, it has no place in public life. if this is not what you want, then show us some evidence and convince us that it really is evidence!
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Woodsy Member (Idle past 3396 days) Posts: 301 From: Burlington, Canada Joined: |
But did you answer Woodsy's simple, direct, and utterly necessary question? No, you did not. You did not even start to answer it. Made absolutely no attempt to answer it. Instead, you redirected our attention away from that question with an entirely unrelated argument. Why didn't you just answer his question? Or at the very least acknowledge it and offer some kind of explanation why you can't answer it ... or explicitly refuse to answer it with some semblance of an explanation as to why? No, you stated flat-out that you had something, "other, and more relevant, ways to scrutinize {the supernatural}", and then you completely avoided presenting any further information about those "ways". Like far too many other Christians before you have repeatedly done far too many times. Like creationists will go on and on about all this evidence they have for creation and yet they consistently refuse to present it, making it glaringly obvious that they have no such evidence and that they know it yet persist in falsely claiming that such evidence does exist. Is that your case? That you really don't have any "other, and more relevant, ways to scrutinize {the supernatural}"? Well then why did you falsely claim that you do? Does this "absolute, universal moral code" of yours, which we know full well prohibits telling falsehoods, not apply in all cases and especially not when a Christian chooses to violate it? How "absolute" is that? Philosophy! Metaphysics, Ethics, Logic, Philosophy of religion. If you want to categorize my argument into one of these, that's ethics. Dealing with morality!
Would you care to show us some examples from these kinds of studies that confirm the existence of the supernatural or, assuming that it does exist, demonstrate its properties? Otherwise, your reply is hopelessly vague. I still haven't seen any beef! The fact that people manage to act morally certainly does not indicate the existence of anything supernatural. After all, "The metaphysicist has no laboratory."!
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Woodsy Member (Idle past 3396 days) Posts: 301 From: Burlington, Canada Joined: |
Back on topic, as requested.
I think the most important question in an apologetics course would be "How do you know that is true?", clearly stated and thoroughly followed up.
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Woodsy Member (Idle past 3396 days) Posts: 301 From: Burlington, Canada Joined: |
I have proposed a new thread on "non-scientific evidence", which has been moved to the Is It Science forum. See you there.
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