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Why God exists
#144899
08/01/07 05:58
08/01/07 05:58
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Joined: Sep 2002
Posts: 700
Orange County, CA
LogantheHogan
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OP
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Posts: 700
Orange County, CA
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Here's a little article I wrote one night a while back. I'd since forgotten about it but I had a little urge tonight (which might have been the Holy Spirit), telling me to post in on Hilbert's Hotel. Read it and maybe we can start a little discussion. I'm sure we've been around the block with this issue many times here on this forum, but I thought maybe I'd give it a spin. here it is. God bless.
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Re: Why God exists
[Re: LogantheHogan]
#144900
08/01/07 22:37
08/01/07 22:37
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Joined: Oct 2004
Posts: 4,134
Netherlands
Joozey
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I want to start with that you did a fairly nice attempt of trying to prove god with science. But you don't really think out of the box and hold to the opinions of other people who did not research any further. If you use your logics, you'd see that alot of what has been written there is twisted in a way that it suddenly does prove god, leaving a few important facts out. What I have written below does not prove that god exists, nor that he/she/it didn't. I simply get the facts from your site and tell you why they are wrong/twisted. I hope to show you that the truth does not stop there where you think you reached your victory. Quote:
And if life began, there must have been a point in time - before it began - when life did not exist. Logical. But wait - we just said that the initiation of life from non-life had to have occured, when the Law of Biogenesis states that this is impossible!
The law of "life cannot exist from unliving material" was there, and has been proven false. Just like you described, it can't be true, because a while back there weren't any living things at all, thus life must have begun from nonliving material. But by saying this theory is false, doesn't mean other theories are wrong. Probably only complex lifeforms can not be created from unliving material, but very simple lifeforms can. Science based upon the first theorie that is also applyable on the second theory are not to be thrown away. So, this does not prove that there was a god at all.
If I use your logics now, I just proved that there is no god;
Quote:
By the very definition of a scientific law we see that this is impossible, except if God, the creator of this law, bypassed it to initiate life. Therefore, God must exist.
I just proved this theory wrong (since life without god is possible by altering the first theory) thus the fact "god exists" can be thrown away  But that is not how you make and scap theories. God may exist because the fact could be applied on a different theory that has not been whiped out by other proven theories.
Now about the chances of nature arranging itself instead of the help of god:
Concidering the size of the universe and the amount of planets, theres about a 99.99% chance that somewhere on one of those planets nature happened to arrange itself. Throwing cards from 30 miles high and hope they will rearrange on the ground... well... the chances are significantly bigger that atoms stuck together in complex molecules, which on their turn move around other molecules in a way that it actually happened to benefit the environment and speeded up certain processes (e.g. inside the atomcore, who knows what kind of forces are generated between atoms when grouping together effecting an atoms behaviour). The process became solid, stable and sucked more molecules in. Small chemical processes start to emerge and so on and so forth.
Over a timerange of millions of years on billions and billions of planets... I think the chance that this would have happened are bigger than throwing a card deck even a thousand times from 5 meter and hope they will land arranged.
Quote:
There's a mosquito buzzing around your head. You tolerate it for a while but eventually it starts really annoying you, so you smack it with a flyswatter and lay it to ruin. At this point you start thinking about the origins of life (who doesn't?). As you look at the dead remains of this bug you realize that all the ingredients for creating life are sitting right there, in one pile. The only thing you did was disorganize these ingredients by smashing the mosquito. You can shock the smear of insect guts with lightning, do a dance, cry on it and hope your tears water it and bring it to life, but the fact is the misquito will not come back to life because (a) it is already dead, and the Law of Biogenesis says that life will never come from things that are not alive, and (b) it is now disorganized and will not organize itself on its own.
I can't say anymore than this is just not true 
1. Eventually, the bug will be consumed by nature and the life ingredients will be shared among other lifeforms.
2. The more complex a lifeform gets, the more fragile it will become. It needs to be desintegrated into seperate pieces of life ingredients again before it will start living.
If you would seal the bug with a box from the entire world, no effect from any other lifeform, and not let any piece of ingredient escape the sealed box and wait a million years, you might see a different bug appear from it.
Maybe you only need a little sunlight, radiation and water going in and out the box though  .
I could think of a dozen of theories why god exists, and nobody could say I was wrong.
I could think of a dozen of theories why god is only between our ears, and nobody could prove me wrong.
But those are theories at the edge of what we know, and what we could imagine what comes next. It will always be speculating. There is no point in saying god does or does not exist, because we simply do not now. No matter how much we like to prove with science. It could very well be that science proves god to be true. I personally would think that as a neat thing, as we can focus on the next step, communicating with our powerfull lord and gain the real facts aside what the bible tells us...
On the other hand, I wouldn't care if there was no god. We just do what we always did; develop and search for other lonely species in space.
EDIT:
Quote:
The truth is, it takes more blind faith to believe in a world without God than in a world with Him. Why not follow Occam's Razor and go with the simpler possible explanation? And while you're at it, you get a God who loves you, wants to know you, has your back, and wants you to spend eternity with Him. Why not?
Because some people made a purpose in their life where they search for love, and some people made a purpose in their life where they chase the truths.
I chase the truths 
Last edited by Jostie; 08/01/07 22:53.
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Re: Why God exists
[Re: LogantheHogan]
#144903
08/02/07 02:49
08/02/07 02:49
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Joined: Sep 2002
Posts: 8,177
Netherlands
PHeMoX
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Netherlands
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Quote:
The truth is, it takes more blind faith to believe in a world without God than in a world with Him. Why not follow Occam's Razor and go with the simpler possible explanation?
God isn't really an explanation, but more so a substitute for what people do not know. So yes, no wonder it seems like it would take less blind faith, but in reality I feel it's just blatantly lying to yourself to ease your mind about complicated things. Because let's face it, in reality we really substitute one unknown for another, but think of it as a solution because we made the switch. That's not right, let alone has anything to do with truth. People go crazy the moment they understand too much or when something is too complicated, that's why certain geniuses are or were so close to being totally insane. I think that when it comes to certain things in life it's a good thing to have simple solutions, but it's simply not always that simple.
It's also open to discussion whether or not a God really would be the 'simplest possible explanation'. Because, what about all the problems in the world? If he has created all, then why did he create problems? Also, if a God did create everything, then why doesn't he reveal himself to us? Why does it seem like there's no God at all? No indications of divine interference or anything alike.
I really think religions exist simply to 'have an answer' and in more recent history (last 2000years) also to control large crowds of people.
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And while you're at it, you get a God who loves you, wants to know you, has your back, and wants you to spend eternity with Him. Why not?
Sure, but those are assumptions stretching the 'if .. is true then .. is also true'. While the existence of God really could be a possibility the vast amount of claims saying things about God's nature and behavior is really equal as unknown as his existence. He might exist but be an real idiot and he might even hate mankind for all we know, his existence doesn't exclude those possibilities.
As long as he doesn't reveal himself (like reveal himself right now), these are all just assumptions with multiple possibilities as well.
Quote:
this article's purpose is not to entirely refute the theory of evolution. I believe that, guided by God's hand, there is no reason why it could not have happened
You believe so, but that doesn't make it anymore truthful than believing the exact opposite.  Anyways, I'm not out to bash you either and you don't need to refute the evolution theory, if God exists he might have set certain things in motion. There is however more than enough proof that discredits the 'creation' story, the Noah's Ark stories and the other stories described in the Bible in which God allegedly showed his direct influence. In fact, there's no evidence that supports any of the so called historical details in the bible.
Off course, the Bible in itself doesn't have to be an indicator of God's existence per say, so to some extent it's not really all that relevant if the Bible is 'wrong' in some way or another.
Quoted from your article;
Quote:
Even beings as intelligent as you or I would not know exactly how to assemble these chemicals without prior experience (which, at the beginning of life, there was none). How could the hypothetical "Mother Nature," a nonintellect, know how to organize them exactly right?
All the more reason to assume there has been a big influence of randomness and chance. Don't forget that the very first environment, whatever it looked like, already must have functioned as a constant trial-and-error experiment. It is goes wrong often enough, it might go right at some point given enough time or 'luck'. From zero 'life and universe' to the near-infinite or possibly infinite current state of all things, all creatures, planets, suns, universes and what more is a gigantic change. But there's no logical reason to assume it could not have happened by trial-and-error, because that in itself IS guidance.
Quote:
This shows that even if somehow, by chance, all the proteins and organic chemicals and DNA and RNA and enzymes needed for life were formed and then brought to a single location, an incredible level of organization is necessary for functioning.
No, you misunderstood in which way 'chance' would be involved. The very first life can not have been a complete cat or dog or koala or elephant, because that would indeed be too complex to get simply be chance. It started very small and evolved and evolved and it still evolving up to this day, every second counts. In fact, everything between the seconds count too.
There have been a lot of seconds from now all the way back to the origin of life. Even expressed in years it's rather hard to imagine how incredibly long it has been, but for me it's without doubt long enough to get life at the point where it is now.
Quote:
You can shock the smear of insect guts with lightning, do a dance, cry on it and hope your tears water it and bring it to life, but the fact is the misquito will not come back to life because (a) it is already dead, and the Law of Biogenesis says that life will never come from things that are not alive, and (b) it is now disorganized and will not organize itself on its own.
Death is simply a different definition for what you call 'disorganized'. If you would actually really repair it instead of doing a tribal dance, it may be possible for it to come to live again. Off course we do not currently posses such medical knowledge and some suggest that it's impossible, but people that do not breath for a couple of minutes and are black-outed can be revived in certain cases.
It doesn't work always, there are no guarantees, except that doing nothing mostly means the people will die. What I'm saying is, it's not that black and white when it comes to alive and death and how we could influence it. It's all about the possibility of using our influence to prevent a soon to be death from actually dying. Perhaps at some point it will be possible to raise the death from their graves. Don't ask me how we can ultimately use it to genuinely create life instead of just cloning, but to some extent the real information about building life lies right in front of us in the form of DNA.
Cheers
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Re: Why God exists
[Re: PHeMoX]
#144904
08/11/07 18:31
08/11/07 18:31
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Joined: Mar 2003
Posts: 3,010
analysis paralysis
NITRO777
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Quote:
Death is simply a different definition for what you call 'disorganized'.
No, death is exactly what the science of Biology calls 'disorganized'.
A high degree of biological order is one of the fundamental characteristics of all living things. In other words 'organization' is one of the reasons why you know something is alive. Other characteristics include sensitivity to environment, movement, reproduction, metabolism and growth.
So his understanding of the organizational factor of living creatures is correct.
I find the whole article interesting, with a slightly new twist to some older arguments. It seems to parallel the whole concept of the origin of matter, since matter itself cannot come from non-matter, but only changes form.
I thought your first definition of a law was interesting because you had stated that if a scientific law were proven false, then "all science based upon that law would collapse" That was an interesting statement.
Of course scientists would challenge whether or not there was such a thing as "the law of biogenesis", of course Pastuer did prove that flies didnt spawn from rotting meat, but that in no way proved that abiogenesis was impossible..or at least not in as strong a way as the law of gravity.(I know that they call it a law)
But if I accepted that there was such a thing as an immutable law of biogenesis, what science would "collapse" if it were proven wrong? I am not questioning your basic theory(because I also believe in God) however I am trying to see what the connection between your original definition of a law and the possibility of biogenesis being proven wrong. I just think you might want to reorganize some of the thinking in your paper because the logic doesnt seem to work out.(for me anyway)
Also entropy is also a factor, but you really didnt seem to build on it much. But it was written well, and of course I always am happy to see another creationist
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No, you misunderstood in which way 'chance' would be involved. The very first life can not have been a complete cat or dog or koala or elephant, because that would indeed be too complex to get simply be chance. It started very small and evolved and evolved and it still evolving up to this day, every second counts. In fact, everything between the seconds count too
Very small, eh? Interesting. Your probably aware that the smallest cell is still much more complicated than a space shuttle? And that the smallest little machines inside these cells are still far beyond the understanding of even our most brilliant microbiologists?
If it were so easy for these life forms to organize themselves and then become alive, why isnt happening today? Why dont we see abiogenesis popping up all around us?
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Re: Why God exists
[Re: Spirit]
#144906
08/22/07 23:54
08/22/07 23:54
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Joined: Apr 2006
Posts: 624
DEEP 13
badapple
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Posts: 624
DEEP 13
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if you believe the bible then you must not believe in dinosours dinosours have been proven the bible has not just my two cents on the subject
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Re: Why God exists
[Re: Ran Man]
#144908
08/23/07 01:57
08/23/07 01:57
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Joined: Sep 2003
Posts: 3,236
San Diego, CA
Marco_Grubert
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Quote:
I had a little urge tonight (which might have been the Holy Spirit), telling me to post in on Hilbert's Hotel.
The Holy Spirit is telling you to post in a miscellaneous discussion section of a game developer forum !?
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