I sincerely hope that you take to heart my advice to you in
Message 983 and format your messages so that they are readable instead of the jumbled mess that they are now.
... Nature's God, as He is called in our Declaration of Independence by the Founding Fathers, who had no doubt whatsoever of His existence.
False equivalence in which you assume every reference to a deity refers specifically to
your own god. Indeed, the first question that comes to me when someone starts talking about "God" is "
Which one?" (out of an estimated 288,000 gods that have we have created) to which that person most often would say, "The Christian God, of course", which raises the next question of which one out of the estimated 45,000 different versions (about 200 different versions in the USA alone, though not counting the multitude of personal versions each individual believer has created). Indeed, if you stood before a crowd of thousands and said "God", then it would mean thousands of different things to that crowd, each member of which would falsely assume you were talking about
his own individual god.
In this case, a deistic narrative about Providence, etc, was common at the time as well as
natural theology , both of which included ideas of a Creator who had set the universe in motion and then stood back to let it run on its own -- that view in lieu of a
personal god such as yours. The two may not be conflated.
For example, Thomas Paine is considered to have influenced the Declaration of Independence, so his discussion of "Nature's God" should be pertinent; from
The Age of Reason:
Thomas Paine:
As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species of Atheism- a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to believe in a man rather than in God. It is a compound made up chiefly of Manism with but little Deism, and is as near to Atheism as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between man and his Maker an opaque body, which it calls a Redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious, or an irreligious, eclipse of light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade.
The effect of this obscurity has been that of turning everything upside down, and representing it in reverse, and among the revolutions it has thus magically produced, it has made a revolution in theology.
That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology.
As to the theology that is now studied in its place, it is the study of human opinions and of human fancies concerning God. It is not the study of God himself in the works that he has made, but in the works or writings that man has made; and it is not among the least of the mischiefs that the Christian system has done to the world, that it has abandoned the original and beautiful system of theology, like a beautiful innocent, to distress and reproach, to make room for the hag of superstition.
So it is foolish to conflate "Nature's God" as the same as your "worship of a man".
And before you dismiss Paine as an "atheist":
Age of Reason, Part One:
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
I kind of see that as a dig against Trinitarianism; Thomas Jefferson was himself influenced by a
Unitarian teacher and was no friend of Trinitarianism.
pseudo-probability nonsense in the Signature Block
Whatever are you talking about? What does any of that have to do with anything?
Seriously! This is nothing more than the standard brain-dead stupid creationist probability argument based entirely on false assumptions,
INCLUDING USING THE WRONG PROBABILITY MODELS. Indeed, the cherry on the top of this shit sundae is that your math model not only does not even remotely describe evolution or abiogenesis, but
rather it describes your own creation ex nihilo model. You're doing nothing but project the problems with your own position.
And while wasting your time with such nonsense, you are also diverting attention from the real issues; eg:
- What do you think evolution is? Nothing creationists say about "evolution" makes any sense since it has nothing to do with evolution. This indicates that you have no clue what evolution is and that your "evolution" is something completely different.
- How do you think evolution works? How do you think that anything works? Again, nothing you say makes any sense, which exposes you as being clueless.
- Why are you so single-mindedly opposed to "evolution"? You seem to think that there's some kind of conflict between evolution and Creation when there is no conflict -- well, that is a conflict between reality and your silly contrary-to-reality creationist claims which makes your creationism anti-Creation (since your creationist god depends on the Creation not being as it actually is).
- Even if you could disprove "evolution", what would that accomplish? Creationists seem to believe that disproving "evolution" (whatever they mean by that word) would "prove God". Not even close! Why would you believe such an extremely stupid thing?
- What the hell are you talking about? This question terrifies creationists.
I hope that you are up to discussing your creationism. Unfortunately, you appear to be a typical creationist who has no clue what he's talking about, especially about his own creationist claims and creationism. A typical creationist who can do no more than regurgitate the bullshit lies he's been feeding on and is incapable of thinking, let alone discussing.
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