Quote:
Originally Posted by Life In Return
It always amazes me when people do not believe that there is a God. That is so... wow... that's like me going outside and saying - There is no air, there are no trees... There are no humans! Actually, there is no such thing as an atheist.
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There is precisely as much evidence that the earth was created by
Amun, the Egyptian god of creation or
Tangaloa, the Polynesian god as there is that the earth was created by a christian god. How do you know christians are right? Remember, most humans
aren't christians and haven't been throughout history. The simple fact that the earth exists cannot be used to prove the existence of one deity or another any more than it can be used to prove that the earth was created by little green aliens from a solar system light years away or indeed in a parallel universe. There is no special piece of evidence that proves christian theology is right.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Life In Return
To think that there is no God is quite foolish. There is no way you can explain how we came into existence, how the WORLD came into existence and say there is no God.
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Actually, it's very easy to explain how we came into existence over the
13 odd billion years since the
big bang. 13 billion years is a time that few can comprehend and a lot can happen in that time. If you lived to be three hundred and sixty years, your heart would have beat about 13.7 billion times. Now imagine your heart beats only once a year instead of 72 times a minute (which is about 38 million times a year). Perhaps that will give you some comprehension of the vast timescale involved.
The study of
evolution (supported by reproducible experiments and the fossil record) can explain our existence without any difficulty whatsoever. Science
isn't a
religion - it's a
method. Now, if you believe that
fossils are simply the skeletons of animals that drowned in the great flood (still a popular theory among many christians) then of course you're going to have difficulty understanding evolution.
Now, here's a question for you Jenn. Do you believe the bible as literal truth (which means the earth was created the way Genesis says it was) or do you have a more modern approach to creation? If you believe the bible is literal truth, then fair enough. It's true to you, but that doesn't mean it's true to anyone else. Even the catholic church largely accepts that the story of creation in Genesis is simply wrong. If you don't believe the bible is the literal truth, then how do
you personally decide which bits of the bible are true and which aren't?
I'm not trying to knock you personally but I would like you to think hard about why you believe what you do and come up with some answers. You've already said that not believing in god is foolish; well you are calling one of the finest minds (
Professor Richard Dawkins) at one of the world's top universities (
Oxford) foolish and I'd really like to see how you justify that rationally and with verifiable evidence. Don't take his title of professor lightly - here in the UK, only the very top academics are awarded that title. Those who have regular university appointments to teach students are called lecturers rather than professors unlike in the USA.