Choosing a faith

You have said previously that you after attending church made a decision to reject the Christian faith. I assume that you believed that the decision that you made to reject Christianity was based on your rejection of Christian doctrine. Do you believe that you reached the correct conclusion?

OK, I get it I suppose. You don't believe in anything. The supernatural might exist and it might not, but you essentially don't think it does.. There is no evidence for you to come to a conclusion ,so essentially you get on with life without really thinking about it. This does though kinda beg the question of why get involved in this discussion as you don't really have a point you want to make.

Here is the Webster definition for materialism as I am using it.

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a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter.

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....or in other words only matter matters.

I'm going to answer this out of sequence as I am so enamoured by the question.That is a great question and in some ways goes back to my original point in a rather oblique way. I'd say that I stopped believing in Santa Claus as an entity but I in another way I never stopped believing in Santa Claus, by believing in my understanding of what he represents.I suggest that you and others here reject belief in the Gospel accounts of Jesus but you may not have, and likely haven't, given up believing in what Jesus stood for, with His message of love, kindness, mercy forgiveness etc.From my point of view as a Christian that is what is important.

Hmmm... and if it is about enhancing his own image do you think he'll tell you that? Colour me sceptical. How do we ever know what is in someone's heart? I often question my own motivation. As a Christian i would say that only God knows. Can you provide us with a copy of that study? Ya, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Not really. I actually start with the belief in a theistic deity because that makes a great deal more sense to me that does a wholly materialistic world. The only evidence I have ever heard is that they know it couldn't happen because it can't happen, and that they see people dying all the time and they aren't resurrected. What other evidence have you got? With a materialistic view then of course it is impossible. If however, there is a deity that is responsible for our existence then resurrection is plausible. Like I said earlier, resurrection is not my starting point.My first priority is the truth, while realizing that it isn't something I can know to be true.

I guess I have a point to make as well. I see secularism as polluting everything. I grew up in a world where it was seen as a positive to attend church and a large percentage of the population attended church even if irregularly. In that world I knew of no one that committed suicide. I knew of no one that died of a drug overdose. There was essentially no one living in streets although I suppose that there like were in large cities. Children still had an age of innocence. People hitch hiked safely all over the place and it wasn't hard to get a ride. After the first couple of days in grade one kids walked to school on their own and we could roam the world on our bikes as long as we wanted, as long as we were home for our next meal. People often left their cars unlocked and often even left the keys in the ignition. They usually didn't lock their house doors. Sure most peoples holidays involved something like a camping trip instead of a Mexican vacation and I can't remember any family having two cars but that was the norm and nobody thought about it, and those things drew families closer together.Sure, we didn't have as easy a life without all the mod cons we have today but people were happier. I actually think that with all the benefits of the internet that it has been a net negative on our communities.Look at our world now. Kids have to be taken to school for their safety. Don't talk to strangers. People and particularly women have to be careful where they go in the city. Suicide rates are high. There is huge number of overdose deaths. There is very little common courtesy left. There is no respect for older generations. Read the papers. It seems that everyday there is a mass killing somewhere or there is another grim news story. Recently in Toronto 8 teenage girls swarmed and beat a homeless man to death.Bottom line is I'll take the world I grew up in, where people went to church for whatever reason, over our easy living, self serving secular world that I live in today. People were more content and happier then. It wasn't perfect by a long shot but it sure was far better than what we have today.

Absolutely. It is incredible what science has been able to uncover and how it has a great self correcting way of working things through. But I make no claims that God can be found through the scientific method. The scientific method is based on repeatable observations or on a past that can be physically examined.What science can't do is tell us what it was that motivates people to do what they do. I was told that you can just aske them but we have no way of confirming their answer nor do I think we can even be sure of our own motivations. We are certainly influenced by the world around us but we have no way of knowing if we are being influenced by God or not. It answers how things exist but not why. If we just consider abiogenesis, the even if science can tell us that it is the result of 2 molecules coming together it will still be about how it happened. We won't know if it was by chance or by a pre-existing intelligence.

We exist as sentient life. We would agree that in the past this world was lifeless. Give me physical evidence that life could evolve from a completely lifeless world without a pre-existing intelligence. Sure we are creating AI now, but it is taking intelligence to do it. My point in this thread was that what you name a deity isn't what matters. What matters is the nature of the deity that you serve. I can't believe you're saying that after all the posts I have made on this forum. I have not only considered that evolution was God's means of creation but I firmly believe it and kick started it with abiogenesis in one way or another. I am even on board with the likelihood of Chris Barrigar's contentions in his book Freedom All The Way Up, that God set the evolutionary process in motion with the probability of sentient life with emotions with a open and unknowable future as a result.Incidentally, a view that I hold pretty much on my own as far as I know, is that God didn't create the material world but did bring about life as we know using the material world. I have written more than once that the following is what I have. I don't care if you call it evidence or a lack of evidence, but I have drawn my own conclusions based on these 4 things. Is it conclusive - no. Is it belief - yes.1/ I have a written evidence in the Bible
2/ I have the fact that life and particularly sentient life exists
3/ I have the fact that we can distinguish good from evil
4/ I have life experience with the experience of love and hate, joy and sadness,
ugliness and beauty etc.I don't understand why you continue to go back to this as this is at least the third time I have posted this. Apparently you've never understood hyperbole. If God can influence people to love altruistically then it can bring about massive change - the equivalent of moving mountains. And now you have moved the goal posts from basic Theism to Christianity. Yes, I believe that as a Christian I believe that the Bible does give us an accurate depiction of the nature of God through the man Jesus. However, I don't say that the nature of God can't be found in other ways. I also contend that the nature of God is often misconstrued and even abused by Christians as has been done over the centuries. However, Christians have also brought about a great deal of good in the world and I would contend that if the intent is to draw others to Jesus, then best way to do it is to live as Christ taught in His message of love, including loving our enemies. I agree that the only physical evidence is what has been written and that is without any other physical evidence to support it.

Nothing wrong with that, although I would say that other than for this forum you are part of a very small minority in claiming that He didn't exist as a man living a couple of thousand years ago.

I'm thinking more along the lines of Dawkins' memes. Evolving seems more applicable to a physical characteristic. I assume that you meant "with and not "without". What physical evidence do you have that empathy evolved scientifically? We seem to agree that it spread but that doesn't give us a reason to choose either atheism or theism. Hey, I agree with all of that. I'd add that I said from the beginning, that the god meme speaks to the religious and non-religious and all have the option of responding to it or rejecting it. In the same chapter of the book "Chance and the Arrow" he writes extensively on entropy and thermodynamics.He kinda wraps it up like this:

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That the early universe set the direction of time's arrow is a wonderful and satisfying conclusion, but we are not done. A huge puzzle remains. How is it that the universe began in such a highly ordered configuration, setting things up so that for billions of years to follow everything could slowly evolve through steadily less ordered configurations toward higher and higher entropy? Don't lose sight of how remarkable this is. As we emphasized, from the standpoint of probability it is much more likely that the partially melted ice cubes you saw at 10:30 got there because a statistical fluke acted itself out in a glass of liquid water, than that they originated in the even less likely state of fully formed ice cubes. And what's true for ice cubes is true a gazillion times over the whole universe. Probabilistically speaking, it is mind-boggling more likely that every thing we now see in the universe arose from a rare but every-so-often expectable statistical aberration away from total disorder , rather than having slowly evolved from the even more unlikely, the incredibly more ordered, the astounding low-entropy starting point required by the big bang.

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Here again is the wiki quote concerning Greene's religious beliefs.

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Greene has stated that he regards science as being incompatible with literalist interpretations of religion and that there is much in the New Atheism movement which resonates with him because he personally does not feel the need for religious explanation. However, he is uncertain of its efficacy as a strategy for spreading a scientific worldview. In an interview with The Guardian he says "When I'm looking to understand myself as a human, and how I fit in to the long chain of human culture that reaches back thousands of years, religion is a deeply valuable part of that story."

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I agree with your response. All I'm saying is that Greene leaves the question of an intelligent designer open saying essentially that he doesn't see the need for a religious explanation which is not the same as saying that there isn't one. I just wanted to point out that a universe that is not restricted to a single time dimension can exist in answer to the question of infinite regression of gods, allowing for an infinite being. I agree that I have no evidence to support that except that it appears that the laws of physics support the possibility. I also agree that this is miles above my pay grade which is why I resorted to quoting Greene. It's a hypothetical that might be true, but we don't know that. I would add as per the first post on this thread, that in Islam as in other world religions we can be serving God by following His command to love His creation and the lives of everyone in it, friend or foe. That is what ultimately matters. Frankly this is pretty much pointless. I'll try this. There are things in this world that lead me to the conclusions that I have come to which you would say are not evidence that should lead me to my conclusions. I have no idea how you will respond to that but I have a hunch it won't be positive. So then I can assume then that the things we see in our societies today are no worse than the world we grew up in.
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This again is from This wiki site

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The question of whether Jesus historically existed is part of the study undertaken in the quest for the historical Jesus and the scholarly reconstructions of his life.[1][2][3] Virtually all scholars of antiquity accept that Jesus was a historical figure[note 1][note 2][4][5][6][7] and dismiss denials of his existence as a fringe theory, while many details like his alleged miracles are subject to debate.[8][9][10][11]

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Standard historical criteria have aided in evaluating the historicity of the gospel narratives,[12][13] and only two key events are almost universally accepted, namely that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and crucified by order of the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate.[10][11][9][14]

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Besides the gospels, sources for the historicity of Jesus include Roman historians Josephus and Tacitus, who lived shortly after the time of Jesus and referenced him and his followers in their histories.

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There is a common thread that appears in every form of religion that I know of and also is there in the non-theistic world. Golden rule in religion I would say that is an acceptable norm for most societies or cultures, even though it is as often or maybe even more often than not ignored. It is more important to focus on that rather than simply arguing about any specific understanding of the world we live in.We can simply come to our own conclusions about why that is.

But you restrict yourself to the physical world. You ignore the question about why and even how the physical world exists. You look at all the various processes and conclude that these processes, one after another, just happened out of the blue by chance. All of the natural processes that you claim as evidence lead you to your naturalistic conclusions and disregard any idea that these processes are there as a result of external intelligence.I agree that nobody can know that a pre-existing intelligence exists at all We come to our own conclusions and we have come to different ones.So, my theistic conclusion make psooible my Christian faith.To which you replied:If I can be shown evidence that my beliefs are without foundation then I'll change mv views. You keep saying that processes are evidence of the non-existence of a deity. That is like saying that an automobile assembly line is the sole cause of the cars they produce. Just like saying that the assembly just occurred is the same thing as you saying that the processes responsible for life just occurred, and that seems to make sense to you. That argument is based on the pre-supposition that there is no external intelligence. If the supernatural exists then how do you know that it didn't happen? You weren't there to observe it, and you discount those who said that they were there and that it did. That doesn't really say anything. People form conclusions on all sorts of things because it makes sense to them. You don't form a conclusion that doesn't make sense to you unless you later find some evidence that causes one to think that it no longer makes sense. I have seen zero evidence that shows that my conclusions are wrong. Showing me examples of how life or even emotions evolved is not evidence of the non existence of an intelligence responsible for those processes and by extension our lives.. Using evolutionary theory as an example we see an incredible process that brought life as we know it into existence which sure seems to show the signs of intelligent design.

Hi PahtPeople from Paul on, (remember Faith even had a precise date which came and went), talked about end times and it being near. I hold a different view of end times that is consistent with scripture that I suggest is even more consistent when we realize that things like Jesus coming on a cloud at the climax of some earth destroying event. Those apocalyptic passages were about the result of a violent Jewish revolution.I contend that the end of time comes to us all as individuals upon physical death. We model our beliefs on Jesus, and He was resurrected right after physical death.I suggest that the end of the world as we know it will come at the hands of mankind through a nuclear war or a human concocted virus. Maybe we can even find a greater way of killing each other that will do the job.