burb: Pardon me, but that doesn’t make any sense to me.
There are thousands of deities out there. What made them pick that one out of the pool? Did they investigate the other deities before deciding on that specific deity? Is there some sort of evidence that this deity is right and the others are wrong? If so, what is that evidence? All of these questions are inherent in “Why God and not another deity?”
Yes, and there is no answer to those questions because no one chooses to believe in one deity over another.
That’s the nature of faith.
I’ll wait for some answers from others before accepting that.
The reason they picked up this god is culture. The answer is in the four gospels - the entire Christianity is based on them and it mentions one specific god. Some specific Christians might have a personal reason to believe in this specific god (“personal experience”, because other gods are lame, whatever), but the actual, historical and collective reason is in the origin of Christianity which the gospels are closely related to.
In a sense, I believe burb is right, because IMO there is nothing historically or scientifically special in God to prefer it to other gods.
I could give answers to the questions “why do they believe in the four gospels” or “why don’t they change or experience other religions”, but some Christians would get angry at me, so I’d rather not.
I’m just gonna answer this whole thread the best way I can as a Christian. I don’t know. No body knows. The earth could be millions of years old. It could be 12,000. Evolution could have taken place. Maybe it didn’t. As a Christian I look into the past and into the future with an open mind. I do deeply care what happened back then, but no one in the whole fucking world has a single clue. That is why I look deeply into the future. What will happen? What will become of me? All I plan for is being a good person. Pray and get in touch with my god. That is the main reason why I hate these threads. No one knows and if someone has an “answer” then a question will follow that answer. Never ending. People have their brain locked into something that you just can shake away from. Atheist, Christians, Catholics, Muslims, ect.
Question and answer is a way to learn, though, Rossman. Share experiences and points of view and grow as a species. Questions invariably follow answers? Good! Great! Excellent! That’s how it should be. If we sit in our “cubicles” and don’t communicate, we stagnate.
But to say that “nobody knows” anything is incorrect. There are many things that we know. We know what happened in the past. We know how evolution happened and is happening. Using what we know from history is what advances us in the future. If you don’t know why you believe in God, you could say that, but then I’d seriously suggest you investigate why you believe that. It could strengthen yourself as a Christian and get you closer to God. Who knows?
The “what if you’re wrong?” question is something I ask myself every day in order to better myself. I try to take my beliefs and see if they’re valid or not with the “what if I’m wrong?” question. What if I’m wrong about the theory of evolution? Well, it seems to work for the evidence but what if I’m wrong? That’s how I do things. I don’t see anyone doing that for religion; it’s almost a sort of arrogance that I see. That’s not to put anyone down or insult them but I never see them try to, well, to be blunt, “think critically” about their religion. But, maybe I’m wrong.
@guga: “why do they believe in the four gospels” and “why don’t they change or experience other religions” is precisely what I’d love to know.
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner 
If I could make all religious people in the world understand only one tiny little thing, that would be it: the conscience that no one knows the truth. I’d make them understand that doubt is not against faith or moral, on the contrary, it is essential to both, and even to science. That is what I think.
I can speak for myself. I used to be a Christian and believed in God because my mother taught me to. I think that we, as humans, are hardwired not to question our traditions unless strictly necessary. You don’t see much people refusing to celebrate a birthday with cake, candles and a song. Furthermore, everyone around me believed in God as well and I wanted to be accepted.
Back then, I had asked myself what made my religion the right one. The problem is I was not questioning whether I was in the right religion, but instead I was trying to find excuses not to have to question myself, so any answer would do. For instance, I had once seen that Buddhism was not against euthanasia or abortion (don’t remember which), so that (and that alone!) made me rule out Buddhism as a possibility. That is obviously just an excuse, not a desire to find the truth. Only less then a month from now I’ve seen a documentary about Buddha’s life and learned how interesting and insightful his teachings were.
I wouldn’t say that is in the least bit accurate. We do have clues. Evidence is everywhere. To say no one in the world has a single clue is to ignore all the evidence and records that have been gathered.
Now looking at this ’ No one knows ’ business. I will grant that in the purest sense, no we don’t know any claims to be true. However, in it’s purest form the idea of KNOWING anything isn’t particularly useful. There is a certain point where when one says ‘know’ we must take it to strictly mean ‘quite certain’ because it is the nature of separate beings that we cannot really ‘know’ anything.
So, to go back to what you are saying. I agree we cannot KNOW young earth creationists are wrong, but with the mountains of evidence we can be quite certain that the earth IS NOT 12,000 years old. Just because we cannot KNOW people are wrong doesn’t mean that their claims are reasonable. Because we cannot know anything at all we must use reason and evidence that is testable and repeatable to create ways to identify with the world we find ourselves in. Anything else is unreasonable and unsupportable.
So, Q:
If it took God 7 days to make the Earth and its Sol, and we can assume (being the perfectionist he is) it took a similar number of days for each subsequent star system, can we put an age on Him by counting the number of stars?
If so, with 9,000,000,000 trillion stars, he’d be 1,200,000,000 trillion years old. Compared to the 0.0137 trillion year age of the universe estimated since the Big Bang, that’s 87,000,000,000 times longer.
So why would the Big Bang be a harder model to believe?
He made the “Heavens and the Earth” in a single “Biblical day” which, depending on who you talk to is a 24-hour standard day, 1,000 years, or, well, any amount of time you desire.
The 1,000 year one always amuses me because it still isn’t scientifically accurate because that means that the universe as created in 6,000 years and the Earth is already full of life…and the Earth came far later than 6,000 years. 6,000 years after the “Big Bang”, there weren’t even any stars or planets; the universe was nothing but an enormous cloud of hot gas (which we can still see today in the far reaches of the universe). Bits of particles didn’t coalesce into stars or planets until about a billion years after the Big Bang. It wasn’t until about 10 billion years after the Big Bang did the planet that would later be called Earth begin to support life.
That’s what the evidence shows. But the Bible states 6 days. So, unless they were “God days” which could be anything, the Bible shouldn’t be taken literally on that front.
Sometimes, I wonder whether the Bible should be taken literally at all. Can I get a Christian perspective on that? Is the Bible part parable/part literal? All literal? All parable? If part parable/part literal, how do you distinguish between them? Some say that the Biblical account (Genesis, et al) is the literal history of the Earth and others say it’s parable. Are they wrong? Are you wrong? How can you tell?
Just curious.
@Tiki: Seeing as God is (If he so chooses to be) outside the realms of time, he could have made everything in an instant if he felt compelled to do so.
Which is why I kind of wonder why it took Him ‘six days’ to do it.
Because he felt like it. :3
Because he wanted humanity to understand the importance of Sunday so it could be observed as a… You know what, I have no idea. Arbitrary idiocy really.
So, uh… he doesn’t exist in time but he decided to let the thing do a few rotations as a beta test?
Well, if I was this omnipotent dude who just came up with this awesome concept of time, I would probably give it a whirl too.
Another question, which I’ll probably not get an answer for, is in relation to the idea that something so “complex” as the universe could not have come about all by itself. If that’s the case, then where did God come from? Who/what made God? Who/what made that? Who/what made that? Who/what made THAT? Ad infinitum. He created Himself? How? He wasn’t there (where?) to create Himself until He was there, right? Spontaneous formation?
I think the simplest explination would be that God exsists because he does, and we being created have a hard time wrapping our head around the idea of not ever having a beginning.
Yet, doesn’t that insert a complication; a sort of unnecessary “middleman” (or perhaps ‘superior’) into the equation? If one believes that God does not have a beginning, why not just say that the universe does not have a beginning and that the universe exists because it does?
That would be the quintessence of Occam’s razor.
Also, I believe that word “created” is a bit loaded. What does it mean to be “created”? From nonexistent to existent? But the ‘raw materials’ were there before I “existed”. My mother and father contributed those raw materials and my mother incubated me until I was able to live in this world. But was I “created”? I don’t believe that my life was created; I am simply a continuation of life that started many many years ago.
As a noted scientist said (and a noted musician made of a song of), we are all made of stars. Life is simply a continuum. From my mother and father before me to their mothers and fathers before them, on and on, back to the formation (not creation) of life.
But this really has to go to the evolution vs creation thread. So, enough yammering from me, what do Christians think?
Could the universe be “uncreated” just as some believe that God was “uncreated”?
Is the Bible a good read? :retard:
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