Iron Chariots Wiki - User contributions [en]

Prayer

2008-06-15T05:41:59Z

Atheistthoughts: /* Objections to prayer */

{{quote-desc||Now, you come along, and pray for something. Well suppose the thing you want isn't in God's Divine Plan? What do you want Him to do? Change His plan? Just for you? Doesn't it seem a little arrogant? It's a Divine Plan. What's the use of being God if every run-down schmuck with a two-dollar prayerbook can come along and fuck up Your Plan?|[[George Carlin]]}}

'''Prayer''' is the act of speaking to a [[god]], either mentally or out loud, to profess loyalty or ask for favors.

==Christianity and prayer==

Prayer in the [[New Testament]] is presented as a positive command ({{bible|Colossians 4:2}}; {{bible|1 Thessalonians 5:17}}). Christians are challenged to include prayer in their everyday life, even in the busy struggles of [[marriage]] ({{bible|1 Corinthians 7:5}}) as it brings people closer to God.

Prayer in the New Testament is also presented as being completely dependable. For example:

* {{bible|Matthew 7:7}} "Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!"
* {{bible|Matthew 17:20}} "For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you."
* {{bible|Matthew 21:21}} "I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer."
* {{bible|Mark 11:24}} "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."
* {{bible|John 14:12-14}} "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son; if you ask anything in my name, I will do it."
* {{bible|Matthew 18:19}} "Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them."

Thus, the stipulations one must fulfill for having their prayers answered are these:

# Have faith. It doesn't matter how much, for even someone with the faith of a mustard seed will have their prayers answered.
# Don't doubt in your faith.
# Believe in Jesus and the works that he does.
# Believe that you will receive what you pray for.
# If you really want your prayer answered, get a group of people to all pray for the same thing.

The [[Bible]] says that if you adhere to these rules then this is what God will do for you:

# He will answer your prayers, no matter what you ask for.
# Nothing will be impossible for you if you pray about it.

==Objections to prayer==

# As the George Carlin quote suggests, the act of prayer seems a little odd for people with belief in a god who is supposed to be [[omniscient]] and [[omnibenevolent]]. Clearly an omniscient god would already be aware of your problems and know what you want. Ultimately, your request may be regarded by God as either [[good]] or [[evil]]. If it is good, then why would God not have granted your wishes already? If it is evil, then why would God ever grant your request?
# Billions of people pray for various things every day. Many of the prayer requests are even contradictory. For instance, in a football game, often the players and fans on both sides are praying to win. If God answers prayers, which side should He choose? The side that prays loudest?
# Christians often state that God can answer prayers in one of three ways; "yes", "no", or "wait". This makes God no different from random chance. After all, when you pray it can either happen (i.e. God answers "yes"), not happen (God answers "no), or you have to wait to see if it will happen (God answers "wait").
# "Successful" prayers rarely have an unambiguous form. Apologists point to events like cancers that go into remission or people waking up from comas as [[evidence]] for the power of prayer. Yet cancer goes into remission and people wake up from comas all the time. How are we to tell the difference between cancer that healed naturally (or thanks to the presence of skilled doctors) and cancer that was cured miraculously? A commonly asked question is, "Why doesn't God heal amputees?" Live footage of a severed limb miraculously regrowing would be far more convincing as proof of the power of prayer. Yet such prayers are apparently never answered, or answered away from the prying eyes of meddlesome investigators.
# Some people say that it isn't God's will to perform unambiguous miracles through prayer. However, if it's all just God's will then why pray? God will just do what he wants to whether you pray about it or not.
# Christians might also say that God doesn't want to provide unambiguous proof of his own existence since this would deny faith. However, this rationalization ignores the myriad of times in the Bible that he does just that.
# Another common rationalization is that God uses unanswered prayers to demonstrate his power through the suffering person's life. For example, a patient with terminal cancer whose faith is deepened because of their ordeal. This raises the question, however, of why an all-knowing and all-loving God couldn't think of a less painful way to accomplish that particular goal. It also raises the question of why a person who already had faith has to endure more pain to have it "deepened".
# A less common rationalization is that a person who gets their leg shot off in a way chose to be on that battlefield of their own [[free will]] and, thus, God has no obligation to heal them. However, this ignores the millions born with missing limbs that were never healed. It's not that God ignores some amputees, it's that he ignores all amputees.
# Some might say that God does heal amputees by divinely inspiring doctors and scientists to cure them. This, however, is easily refuted by [[Occam's Razor]]. God's inspiration isn't necessary for doctors and scientists to find ways to cure amputees. And why did God feel the need to bypass this kind of helpful inspiration for thousands of years and reduce the suffering only in the modern age?
# Others say that God can't be tested since he's so much higher than us. This ignores the story of Gideon in the Old Testament and Thomas in the New Testament who both did exactly that and who received the proof that each had asked for.
# Some Christians say that Jesus never specified when he would answer prayers and that maybe he will answer them in the afterlife. This is unfair since God apparently answers so many other prayers during the believers' lifetimes. Also, the verses quoted above are unambiguous in the fact that they state that whatever you ask for you'll get during your life.
# Some might bring up the objection that these verses aren't to be taken literally. Firstly, the verses themselves are certainly written like they should be taken literally. Secondly, if this objection is used the believer must provide an objective reason why these verses are non-literal. If no reason can be provided then the verses should continue to be taken literally.
# {{bible|Matthew 21:21}} says that you must have faith and not doubt for your prayers to be answered. This offers a convenient loophole for unanswered prayers. If you pray and you satisfy every single stipulation and yet your prayer is never answered, Christians can always fall back on saying "You didn't believe enough" or "You doubted your faith". Since there is no empirical way to define how much belief is "enough", this becomes an [[ad hoc]] explanation which makes prayer [[unfalsifiable]]. It also undermines the fact that some theists will claim that they themselves or people they know of have become believers after being prayed for and where the result was some miraculous event.
# It's important to remember statistical probability when considering supposed miracles. For example, let's say there's a disease that has no cure and let's say 999,999,999 people so far have contracted it but none have survived. However, let's say the billionth person to contract it ''does'' survive. This isn't a miracle; it simply means that the odds of survival are now 1 out of 1,000,000,000.
# Finally, when all else fails a Christian might say "People have believed in Jesus for 2,000 years. There must be a good reason for it." This is a non sequitur because it ignores the political and cultural forces that shape all societies and modes of belief throughout time and instead focuses on its own supposed inherent goodness. It also fails to account for all of the other competing beliefs that survived with it for equally long or longer periods of time like Islam and Judaism. Strangely, you don't hear Christians arguing that there must be good reasons for those religions' survival too!

==External links==

* [http://whydoesgodhateamputees.com/god5.htm Why Won't God Heal Amputees?]
* [http://www.valleyskeptic.com/george.htm George Carlin on Religion and Prayer] (full version)

[[Category:Religious rituals]]

Biblical inerrancy

2006-08-02T04:58:50Z

Atheistthoughts: /* Counter-arguments */

'''Biblical inerrancy''' is the doctrine that the [[Bible]] is completely correct, or at least that it was completely correct in the original manuscripts.

This belief is surprisingly common, especially among [[fundamentalists]].

==Counter-arguments==

# There are many contradictions in the Bible, many of them very hard to dispute. [http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jim_meritt/bible-contradictions.html Here is a big list], and [http://www.atheists.org/christianity/contradictions.html here is a smaller one].
# The Bible is clearly inconsistent with scientific observations. The [[Genesis]] account of [[Creation]] is only the beginning. Take Job 38:22-23, for example. God is quoted as saying, "Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle?" We now know how snow and hail form, and it doesn't involve storehouses or war.
# The Bible is at least guilty of glossing over rounding error. By simple arithmetic we can arrive at the [[Biblical value of pi]]: three. Not 3.14, not 3.1415926536, not "a little more than three"; simply three.
# Some contradictions, like 2 Kings 8:26 and 2 Chronicles 22:2, which give different ages for Ahaziah when he began to rule, are, Christians admit, really contradictions that are really in the bible. They have to resort to copyist error or some other similar explanation. This shows that the modern bible is not inerrant. This raises the question of why God inspired the original writers, but not the copyist.

Talk:Can God create a rock so heavy that he can't lift it?

2006-08-02T01:13:30Z

Atheistthoughts:

WRT the last paragraph: is this really a cop-out? It only limits God to that which is logically possible, not just that which is physically possible. That is, defining God to be unable to have an apple and to not have any apples simultaneously does not necessarily limit his ability to travel faster than light, or go backward in time, or create planets out of nowhere. --[[User:Arensb|Arensb]] 17:50, 17 July 2006 (MST)

: Perhaps cop-out isn't quite the right term. First, I wish to highlight the fact that "all-powerful" is a weird term to use once you start putting qualifiers on what "all" means. And they don't really stop at the logically impossible; they also say that God can't do things that are against his nature, whatever that means. It seems to me that when you start specifying the limitations on what God can do, it's sort of a "gateway drug" to deciding that you can add all kinds of restrictions and still say that he's omnipotent.
:
: If you can word that better, feel free to fix it. --[[User:Kazim|Kazim]] 07:24, 18 July 2006 (MST)
:: I think you're making a sorites argument: "a god who can do everything, even the logically-impossible, is omnipotent"; "a god who can do everything except the logically-impossible is still omnipotent"; and so on, until we get to "a god who can usually raise his hand if no one's standing on it is still omnipotent".
:: I'll accept that "God can do anything he can do" is a useless tautology. But in this case, ISTM that it's up to the theist to define "omnipotence" in some reasonable way. The fact that there can be different degrees of omnipotence does not mean that they're all reasonable. --[[User:Arensb|Arensb]] 08:52, 18 July 2006 (MST)

:::Then fix it! :) --[[User:Kazim|Kazim]] 10:56, 18 July 2006 (MST)

: This may be completely unrelated, and, if somebody doesn't like it, you can delete this, but not even God can go faster than light. I'd also like to not that I don't like this argument, because, as Arensb pointed out, God can do anything logically possible. Not even God can defy logic, because then I can be God. God cannot create something that can't exist. Before I change the article, however, I'd like to make sure that most people here agree. --[[User:atheistthoughts|atheistthoughts]]

:: An argument against that idea is that if the god "invented" the universe (and everything in it) then by definition logic is a construct that simply reflects that universe - if the universe changed (which is supposedly within the power of an omnipotent deity) then it's possible (although I obviously can't comprehend it) that the rules of logic, the universal constants, etc. could be changed as well. If the god cannot change the universe, then it is not omnipotent (again). [[User:Blu Matt|Blu Matt]] 05:02, 1 August 2006 (MST)

::: Defending the idea of God is harder than I thought. I feel sorry for those Chrstian apologists. I don't think logic reflects the universe, but the universe reflects logic. You can't throw out logic and keep the universe, but you can throw out the universe and keep logic. Logic is, in a way, God. Even God has to obey logic. God didn't create logic, logic coexists with God. --[[User:atheistthoughts|atheistthoughts]] 11:30, 1 August 2006 (MST)

:: Re: "not even God can go faster than light":
:: Consider the case where the universe is a simulation being run on God's computer (à la ''The Matrix''). In this case, the laws of physics don't apply to God. In fact, the normal axes of space and time can't even be mapped to God's axes.
:: God may not be able to travel faster than light, any more than the author of Super Mario Brothers can jump higher than 300 pixels, but he may be able to pause the simulation, reach in with a debugger (which ignores the laws of the simulated universe), create an avatar (a burning bush, an angel, a cluster of galaxies 600 Mpc wide in the shape of a mouth, etc.), and unpause the simulation.
:: Such a god ''might'' be able to create an FTL object or avatar. I'm not at all sure that he'd be able to create an electron with well-defined position '''and''' momentum, because I'm not sure that such a thing makes sense; or if it does, then it's probably not really an electron. But even this god can't make 0+1 be anything other than 1.
:: Does this help any?
:: --[[User:Arensb|Arensb]] 13:07, 1 August 2006 (MST)

::: RE: "Does this help any?":
::: Not really. Mainly because I have no idea what you're trying to prove. If you're trying to say that God can break the speed of light with a particle, I disagree. If this particle was material, then, to go faster than the speed of light, it would go ''back in time''. This, obviously, doesn't make any sense. --[[User:atheistthoughts|atheistthoughts]] 7:13, 1 August 2006 (MST)

== Omnipotence paradox ==

Isn't this the same as the [[Omnipotence_paradox_argument|omnipotence paradox argument]]? [[User:Blu Matt|Blu Matt]] 18:00, 31 July 2006 (MST)

: I think so. I guess these two articles ought to be merged (I vote to keep [[omnipotence paradox argument]]). But there's good stuff in both, so it's not as simple as just deleting one and redirecting the other.

:: I agree. [[User:Blu Matt|Blu Matt]] 04:52, 1 August 2006 (MST)

::: I'm not so sure about this. I think that "Can God make a rock so heavy..." is a recognizable claim in its own right which ought to show up in the index. At the same time, I'm also inclined to be very cautious about any duplication going on. I notice that this page also duplicates some work on the [[omnipotent]] page.

::: I'd like to tentatively propose the following changes:
:::# Keep this page.
:::# Change the [[omnipotence paradox argument]] page to just [[omnipotence paradox]]. I don't think the modifier "argument" adds anything useful.
:::# On the OP page, remove detailed reference to "Can God create..." question; instead link this page from there.
:::# On the '''omnipotent''' page, remove discussion of the paradox and replace it with a link to the OP page.
:::# Also while I'm on the subject, [[omnipotent]] should probably redirect to [[omnipotence]], [[omniscient]] to [[omniscience]], etc.

::: Anyone have any objections/counter-suggestions?
::: --[[User:Kazim|Kazim]] 12:32, 1 August 2006 (MST)
:::: Sounds good to me [[User:Sans Deity|Sans Deity]] 13:12, 1 August 2006 (MST)
:::: Ditto -- [[User:Blu Matt|Blu Matt]] 14:14, 1 August 2006 (MST)
::::: So it was written, and so it has been done. --[[User:Kazim|Kazim]] 14:27, 1 August 2006 (MST)

Talk:Can God create a rock so heavy that he can't lift it?

2006-08-01T17:31:41Z

Atheistthoughts:

Talk:Can God create a rock so heavy that he can't lift it?

2006-08-01T17:20:55Z

Atheistthoughts:

Lee Strobel

2006-08-01T04:30:49Z

Atheistthoughts:

Popular apologetics speaker; author of ''[[The Case for Christ]]'', ''[[The Case for a Creator]]'' and ''[[The Case for Faith]]''.

[[Category: Christian apologists]]

Talk:Can God create a rock so heavy that he can't lift it?

2006-08-01T04:25:45Z

Atheistthoughts:

User:Atheistthoughts

2006-08-01T01:58:52Z

Atheistthoughts:

Atheistthoughts is the user name of Tony Sommer in Independence, Missouri. As a high schooler in the bible belt, he's imfamous among friends for being an atheist, often getting into debates with Christian friends. His blog, www.xanga.com/atheistthoughts, is known for unorthodox posts. He is curently working on a book titled ''Atheistthoughts: The Logical Necessity of Atheism'', which is built around the asumption that, no matter how strong the evidence, God is not a good explanation.

Talk:Soul

2006-08-01T01:32:41Z

Atheistthoughts:

I don't know what I did, but the numbering's wrong. Can somebody fix it?

Soul

2006-08-01T01:32:11Z

Atheistthoughts: /* Counter-Apologetics */

The soul is an immmaterial spirit that many religions claim reside in a human's body. The soul is responsible for the consciousness. In Christianity the soul goes to heaven or hell after you die.

==Counter-Apologetics==

# Nobody knows how the soul interacts with the body. Since it's immaterial, physical things cannot influence it, yet it somehow communicates with the brain and vice versa.

# The idea of a soul raises many questions about relativity. If the soul doesn't occupy our universe, then it shouldn't experience time. Since we do feel time, it cannot be immaterial. Since it occupies our universe, this raises many questions about what it's made of. Is it made up of the basic particles that all matter is made of? If it's an entirely different type of particle, what's it's mass? Is it influenced by the four fundamentaal forces? What's it's charge? How does it manage to hold your consciousness. None of these questions have ever been answered, so to use the soul to explain something, you are using a term that isn't defined.

Soul

2006-08-01T01:31:49Z

Atheistthoughts: /* Counter-Apologetics */

Soul

2006-08-01T01:30:23Z

Atheistthoughts:

Soul

2006-08-01T01:18:19Z

Atheistthoughts:

The soul is an immmaterial spirit that many religions claim reside in a human's body. The soul is responsible for the consciousness. In Christianity the soul goes to heaven or hell after you die.

Cosmological argument

2006-07-31T23:02:20Z

Atheistthoughts: /* Counter-Apologetics */

The '''cosmological argument''', or "first cause" argument, takes the existence of the universe to entail the existence of a being that created it. It does so based on the fact that the universe had a beginning. There must, the first cause argument says, be something that caused that beginning, a first cause of the universe. The cause is assumed to be [[God]].

==Apologetics==

The argument runs like this:
# Everything that exists must have a cause.
# If you follow the chain of events backwards through time, it cannot go back infinitely, so eventually you arrive at the first cause.
# This cause must, itself, be uncaused.
# But nothing can exist without a cause, except for God.
# Therefore, God exists.

==Counter-Apologetics==

The most concise answer to this argument is: "[[Who created God?]]"

There is a contradiction between the first statement and the second statement. If "everything that exists has a cause" then there cannot exist anything that does not have a cause, which means that there is no first cause. Either some things can exist without causes, or nothing can. It can't be both ways.

It is not necessarily the case that there are not an infinite chain of causes and effects. We know that our universe had a beginning (the [[big bang]]) but we don't know what occurred in the first split second after the big bang, nor can we comment on anything that came before it. There may have been another universe that gave birth to this one. The universe may even exist inside a meta-universe, which does not have a beginning.

On the other hand, even if we grant that a first cause exists, it makes no sense to assume that it is any kind of god, let alone [[Yahweh]]. The idea of an intelligent, universe-creating god "just existing" is '''far''' more difficult to explain than the universe itself "just existing". [[Intelligence]] is one of the most complex things we are aware of in the universe. To assume a being who is so intelligent that it can design an entire universe, as well as micromanage the personal lives of billions of people on earth through prayer, would require an enormous amount of explanation.

Christians try to avoid this issue by saying "God does not need a cause because He is outside of time." This is a glib non-answer. If all that is required to get around the first cause argument is an entity that exists outside of time, then all we need to do is postulate a single particle that exists outside of time and triggered the big bang. It need not have any special powers at all. Besides, this particle might even exist, depending on how you define "outside of time". Photons, light particles, do not experience time, since they move at the speed of light. Therefore, according to this argument, light can pop into existance wthout cause.

Theists will object that this particle should have a cause. But they have already refuted this argument by granting that there exists an uncaused cause in the first place. If God can exist without a cause, why not a particle? Why not the universe?

This argument can be associated with the First Law of Thermodynamics, which says that the amount of mass and energy in the universe will remain constant. They cannot prove the proposition "Everything has a cause." without proving the First Law of Thermodynamics. Since this law only talks about mass and energy, space-time itself can, as far as we know, pop into existance whenever it wants. Some scientists, expecially those who favor M-theory, say that, in a multi-universe model, when two universes colide it could create a matter and energy in a big bang, which would be the cause of mass and energy. Therefore, it is entirely possible for the universe to arise from material sources.

[[Category: Arguments]]
[[Category: Arguments for the existence of God]]
[[Category: Cosmological arguments]]

Noah's ark

2006-07-31T21:39:47Z

Atheistthoughts: /* Counter-arguments */

In the [[Bible]], this is the story of how [[God]] drowned every person on earth with a great flood, sparing only a man named Noah and his family of seven. [[Fundamentalists]] believe that the story is literally true, and there have been many claims to have found the ark on which Noah and his family sailed.

==The story==

The story of Noah's ark is told in [[Genesis]] 6:11-8:22. God sees that the world has become full of evil, and decides to kill everyone on Earth, with the exception of Noah, his three sons, and their respective wives.

God explains to Noah that he is going to flood the earth, and tells him to build a vessel, an ark. God gives instructions on how to build the ark, what its dimensions should be, and so forth. He also tells Noah to bring representative samples of all living creatures: either one pair of each animal (Genesis 6:19-20) or seven of each clean animal (or seven pairs) and two of each unclean animal (Genesis 7:2-3).

After the animals have been loaded onto the ark, god sends rain and opens up the "fountains of the great deep" for forty days and forty nights, until the earth is covered with water and every living being has died, except for those on the ark. The floodwaters start subsiding, and a year later the ark rests on "the mountains of Ararat".

Noah releases a raven through the window of the ark, but it can't find any dry land, and keeps flying around until the water subsides. Noah sends out a dove, but it returns, not having found any dry land. A week later, Noah releases the dove again, and this time it returns with an olive leaf in its beak, indicating that the water level is getting low. A week later, he releases the dove again, but it fails to return, and Noah looks out to see that the world has dried out.

==Counter-arguments==

# There are millions of known animal species in the world; it would take an impossibly large ship to hold representatives of all species, not to mention food for at least a year.
# Assuming that Noah did not take two of each species, but two of each "kind", that still requires an awfully rapid [[evolution]] explosion to account for the biological diversity today. If all creatures on earth were destroyed some five thousand years ago in the Great Flood, it would require incredibly fast evolution to cause, for instance, the dog "kind" to produce both dire wolves and chihuahuas. If we take a very conservative estimate of 1 million species that decended from creatures on Noah's ark, and asume that 16,000 "kinds" of animal were on the ark, each "kind" would have had to evolve into over 62 species in the 4000 years since Noah's flood.
# The flood story does not explain the present geographic distribution of species, e.g., how did marsupials wind up in Australia, and only in Australia?
# The story of Noah is not the first Middle Eastern deluge story. The story told by Utnapishtim in "The Epic of Gilgamesh", in which the God Enlil and other deities drown the world to rid it of evil, is referred to as far back as 2000 B.C.E. Its most complete version comes from tablets dated between 669 and 633 B.C.E. The modern book of Genesis was not compiled for another 200 years.
# The Deluge would have meant the resetting of DNA lines for nearly every living thing on earth. All DNA lines should curiously and rapidly narrow to small breeding populations located in the Middle East. Ignoring every other creature on earth, we can say with some confidence, that human DNA lines appear to originate in Africa. Most lines do not appear to have stopped in the middle east 4000 to 5000 years ago.
# The Deluge, according to available timelines, occurred between 2348 B.C.E. and 2150 B.C.E. It should have represented a clear historical breaking point for every civilization around the world. No such break point exists. The river of history appears to have continued flowing uninterrupted through the Great Flood.
# Once the animals got off the ark, they would have nothing to eat. All the plants would have died in the flood, so the herbivores would have nothing to eat. The carnivores would wipe them out anyway, and then they would die too.
# Creationists often claim that there were only babies of each species and only seeds of each plant on the ark, but then this would require a time for them to grow. For every ten units of mass on one level of the food chain, only one unit of mass can be created on the next level. That means for a lion, which wieghs over 400 pounds, to become fully grown, he needs to eat 4,000 pounds of meat, and that animal would have to eat 40,000 pounds of plant to get that much weight. It is therefore absurd to think that Noah could have taken babies on the ark.

==External Links==
''Logical Inconsistencies:''
* [http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/msg/bad0d3c8a5fb8d8b?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 Torpedo Ye Arke], by Pat James
* [http://skepdic.com/noahsark.html The Skeptic's Dictionary]

''Biblical Timelines:''
* [http://atheism.about.com/library/chronologies/blchron_ot1.htm About.com Religious Timelines]
* [http://www.andrews.edu/SEM/bket/BKET%20OT%20Time%20Line.htm The Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary Timeline]
* [http://www.wordsight.org/btl/000_btl-fp.htm Word Sight's Bible Time-line]

''Historical Timelines:''
* [http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/03/wam/ht03wam.htm The Metropolitan Museum of Art historical timeline]
* [http://fontes.lstc.edu/~rklein/Doc6/3rdmill.htm Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago historical timeline]
* [http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001198.html Infoplease.com Ancient history timeline]

''Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim''
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utnapishtim Wikipedia Entry: Utnapishtim]
* [http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/ The Epic of Gilgamesh]

''DNA and Mapping Human Migration''
* [https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/atlas.html National Geographic and the Genographic Project]

[[Category: Religious mythology]]
[[Category: The Bible]]

Pascal's Wager

2006-07-31T03:39:49Z

Atheistthoughts: /* Counter-Arguments */

Pascal's wager is the argument that you should believe in [[God]], even if there's a strong chance that He might not be real. The claim is that you should believe in God just because there's a chance that you might go to [[heaven]] and avoid [[hell]].

The argument was first formally put forth by [[Blaise Pascal]], a philosopher and mathematician in the 17th century. A very good mathematician, in fact, to whom we owe several interesting formulas. There's also a programming language named after him.

Pascal's wager, in a nutshell, is this. No one knows for certain whether God exists. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. It's a gamble whether you believe in him or not. So let's treat it like a gamble, says Pascal, and look at the odds.

He described the payoff of this gamble like so. If you choose to believe in God, and you happen to be right, then the reward is infinity. Eternal bliss in heaven. However, if you are wrong, then you lose nothing at all. On the other hand, if you choose not to believe in God, and you're right, you GAIN nothing (in either of the previous two cases, you just die and that's the end). But if you are wrong, your payoff is negative infinity. Eternal suffering in hell.

Now here's the main thrust of the wager. Since the chance of God existing is unknown, but the payoff/punishment scheme is infinitely in favor of believing in God, just on the small chance that he might exist, you'd better believe. It's the only wager that makes sense.

==Counter-Arguments==

# In the case where God does not exist, there really is a clear advantage to not believing. In other words, the payoff is not zero. For one thing, if you go through life believing a lie, that is a bad thing in itself. Besides that, there is more to being a believer than just saying "Okay, I believe now" and getting on with your life. Serious believers spend a lot of their time in church, and contribute a lot of money as well. There's a reason why some towns have very affluent looking buildings for churches, and why large and elaborate cathedrals are possible: they're funded by folks who donate 1/10th of their income throughout their lives to tithing. This is surely quite a waste if the object of worship isn't real. That's to say nothing of the persecution of other groups that's been instigated in the name of God throughout the ages. Also, churches don't have to pay taxes, which includes property tax. Property tax is what goes to schools, so all the land that churches own is sucking money out of schools
# Even if you buy into Pascal's wager and decide you should believe, that doesn't give any basis for choosing which religion to believe in. Fundamentalists often use the wager to prove that you should be a Fundamentalist, but of course, Pascal was Catholic and was using it to prove you should be a Catholic! This just highlights the whole problem of which religion is the right one. Since many Fundamentalists believe that Catholics are going to go to hell, Pascal's not much better off than an unbeliever. We don't know if the Jews are correct, or perhaps the Muslims, or if reincarnation is right... or worse, if there's a perverse God who only lets atheists into heaven! It's not impossible. For all we know, maybe God exists but he doesn't care at all whether people believe in him.
# If you can accept Pascal's wager as a realistic reason to believe, that leads you to a point where you have no choice but to believe just about everything on the same grounds. Maybe if you don't own a complete library of Seinfeld episodes, you'll go to hell! Why not? You don't know. Maybe you have to send $10 a week to the Atheist Community of Austin for life. Hey, what's a measly ten bucks if it will save you from eternal hellfire? Or maybe God really likes nude mud wrestling and he will punish those who do not partake of His gift.

==External Links==

*[http://www.jhuger.com/pascal Pascal's Sucker Bet]

[[Category:Arguments]]

User:Atheistthoughts

2006-07-31T02:53:33Z

Atheistthoughts:

Atheistthoughts is the user name of Tony Sommer in Independence, Missouri. As a high schooler in the bible belt, he's imfamous among friends for being an atheist, often getting into debates with Christian friends. His blog, www.xanga.com/atheistthoughts, is known for unorthodox posts. He is curently working on a book titled Atheistthoughts: The Logical Necessity of Atheism, which is built around the asumption that, no matter how strong the evidence, God is not a good explanation.

Noah's ark

2006-07-31T02:46:48Z

Atheistthoughts: /* Counter-arguments */

In the [[Bible]], this is the story of how [[God]] drowned every person on earth with a great flood, sparing only a man named Noah and his family of seven. [[Fundamentalists]] believe that the story is literally true, and there have been many claims to have found the ark on which Noah and his family sailed.

==The story==

The story of Noah's ark is told in [[Genesis]] 6:11-8:22. God sees that the world has become full of evil, and decides to kill everyone on Earth, with the exception of Noah, his three sons, and their respective wives.

God explains to Noah that he is going to flood the earth, and tells him to build a vessel, an ark. God gives instructions on how to build the ark, what its dimensions should be, and so forth. He also tells Noah to bring representative samples of all living creatures: either one pair of each animal (Genesis 6:19-20) or seven of each clean animal (or seven pairs) and two of each unclean animal (Genesis 7:2-3).

After the animals have been loaded onto the ark, god sends rain and opens up the "fountains of the great deep" for forty days and forty nights, until the earth is covered with water and every living being has died, except for those on the ark. The floodwaters start subsiding, and a year later the ark rests on "the mountains of Ararat".

Noah releases a raven through the window of the ark, but it can't find any dry land, and keeps flying around until the water subsides. Noah sends out a dove, but it returns, not having found any dry land. A week later, Noah releases the dove again, and this time it returns with an olive leaf in its beak, indicating that the water level is getting low. A week later, he releases the dove again, but it fails to return, and Noah looks out to see that the world has dried out.

==Counter-arguments==

# There are millions of known animal species in the world; it would take an impossibly large ship to hold representatives of all species, not to mention food for at least a year.
# Assuming that Noah did not take two of each species, but two of each "kind", that still requires an awfully rapid [[evolution]] explosion to account for the biological diversity today. If all creatures on earth were destroyed some five thousand years ago in the Great Flood, it would require incredibly fast evolution to cause, for instance, the dog "kind" to produce both dire wolves and chihuahuas.
# The flood story does not explain the present geographic distribution of species, e.g., how did marsupials wind up in Australia, and only in Australia?
# The story of Noah is not the first Middle Eastern deluge story. The story told by Utnapishtim in "The Epic of Gilgamesh", in which the God Enlil and other deities drown the world to rid it of evil, is referred to as far back as 2000 B.C.E. Its most complete version comes from tablets dated between 669 and 633 B.C.E. The modern book of Genesis was not compiled for another 200 years.
# The Deluge would have meant the resetting of DNA lines for nearly every living thing on earth. All DNA lines should curiously and rapidly narrow to small breeding populations located in the Middle East. Ignoring every other creature on earth, we can say with some confidence, that human DNA lines appear to originate in Africa. Most lines do not appear to have stopped in the middle east 4000 to 5000 years ago.
# The Deluge, according to available timelines, occurred between 2348 B.C.E. and 2150 B.C.E. It should have represented a clear historical breaking point for every civilization around the world. No such break point exists. The river of history appears to have continued flowing uninterrupted through the Great Flood.
# Once the animals got off the ark, they would have nothing to eat. All the plants would have died in the flood, so the herbivores would have nothing to eat. The carnivores would wipe them out anyway, and then they would die too.
# Creationists often claim that there were only babies of each species and only seeds of each plant on the ark, but then this would require a time for them to grow. For every ten units of mass on one level of the food chain, only one unit of mass can be created on the next level. That means for a lion, which wieghs over 400 pounds, to become fully grown, he needs to eat 4,000 pounds of meat, and that animal would have to eat 40,000 pounds of plant to get that much weight. It is therefore absurd to think that Noah could have taken babies on the ark.

==External Links==
''Logical Inconsistencies:''
* [http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/msg/bad0d3c8a5fb8d8b?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 Torpedo Ye Arke], by Pat James
* [http://skepdic.com/noahsark.html The Skeptic's Dictionary]

''Biblical Timelines:''
* [http://atheism.about.com/library/chronologies/blchron_ot1.htm About.com Religious Timelines]
* [http://www.andrews.edu/SEM/bket/BKET%20OT%20Time%20Line.htm The Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary Timeline]
* [http://www.wordsight.org/btl/000_btl-fp.htm Word Sight's Bible Time-line]

''Historical Timelines:''
* [http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/03/wam/ht03wam.htm The Metropolitan Museum of Art historical timeline]
* [http://fontes.lstc.edu/~rklein/Doc6/3rdmill.htm Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago historical timeline]
* [http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001198.html Infoplease.com Ancient history timeline]

''Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim''
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utnapishtim Wikipedia Entry: Utnapishtim]
* [http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/ The Epic of Gilgamesh]

''DNA and Mapping Human Migration''
* [https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/atlas.html National Geographic and the Genographic Project]

[[Category: Religious mythology]]
[[Category: The Bible]]

User:Atheistthoughts

2006-07-31T02:33:03Z

Atheistthoughts:

Atheistthoughts is the usar name of Tony Sommer in Independence, Missouri. As a high schooler in the bible belt, he's imfamous among friends for being an atheist, often getting into debates with Christian friends. His blog, www.xanga.com/atheistthoughts, is known for unorthodox posts. He is curently working on a book titled Atheistthoughts: The Logical Necessity of Atheism, which is built around the asumption that, no matter how strong the evidence, God is not a good explanation.

Cosmological argument

2006-07-31T02:28:20Z

Atheistthoughts: /* Counter-Apologetics */

The '''cosmological argument''', or "first cause" argument, takes the existence of the universe to entail the existence of a being that created it. It does so based on the fact that the universe had a beginning. There must, the first cause argument says, be something that caused that beginning, a first cause of the universe. The cause is assumed to be [[God]].

==Apologetics==

The argument runs like this:
# Everything that exists must have a cause.
# If you follow the chain of events backwards through time, it cannot go back infinitely, so eventually you arrive at the first cause.
# This cause must, itself, be uncaused.
# But nothing can exist without a cause, except for God.
# Therefore, God exists.

==Counter-Apologetics==

The most concise answer to this argument is: "[[Who created God?]]"

There is a contradiction between the first statement and the second statement. If "everything that exists has a cause" then there cannot exist anything that does not have a cause, which means that there is no first cause. Either some things can exist without causes, or nothing can. It can't be both ways.

It is not necessarily the case that there are not an infinite chain of causes and effects. We know that our universe had a beginning (the [[big bang]]) but we don't know what occurred in the first split second after the big bang, nor can we comment on anything that came before it. There may have been another universe that gave birth to this one. The universe may even exist inside a meta-universe, which does not have a beginning.

On the other hand, even if we grant that a first cause exists, it makes no sense to assume that it is any kind of god, let alone [[Yahweh]]. The idea of an intelligent, universe-creating god "just existing" is '''far''' more difficult to explain than the universe itself "just existing". [[Intelligence]] is one of the most complex things we are aware of in the universe. To assume a being who is so intelligent that it can design an entire universe, as well as micromanage the personal lives of billions of people on earth through prayer, would require an enormous amount of explanation.

Christians try to avoid this issue by saying "God does not need a cause because He is outside of time." This is a glib non-answer. If all that is required to get around the first cause argument is an entity that exists outside of time, then all we need to do is postulate a single particle that exists outside of time and triggered the big bang. It need not have any special powers at all.

Theists will object that this particle should have a cause. But they have already refuted this argument by granting that there exists an uncaused cause in the first place. If God can exist without a cause, why not a particle? Why not the universe?

This argument can be associated with the First Law of Thermodynamics, which says that the amount of mass and energy in the universe will remain constant. They cannot prove the proposition "Everything has a cause." without proving the First Law of Thermodynamics. Since this law only talks about mass and energy, space-time itself can, as far as we know, pop into existance whenever it wants. Some scientists, expecially those who favor M-theory, say that, in a multi-universe model, when two universes colide it could create a matter and energy in a big bang, which would be the cause of mass and energy. Therefore, it is entirely possible for the universe to arise from material sources.

[[Category: Arguments]]
[[Category: Arguments for the existence of God]]
[[Category: Cosmological arguments]]