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Thread: My relegation to agnosticism

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    The earless Dionysus Lutiferre's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Smaland View Post
    God has not been silent. He has given us the Scriptures to tell us what He thinks, how He feels, how we should order our lives, and what He expects of us.

    When He was on the cross, even Jesus felt forsaken, as is shown in Mark 15:34 (KJV): "And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

    Because Jesus had taken the sins of the world upon Himself, I believe that the Father may have had to avert His gaze for a moment. But we know that this was only temporary, because the Resurrection occurred shortly afterward.

    I earnestly hope that you will not give up, but stand fast in the faith.
    Well, I appreciate you trying, but I already know Christian teaching with regard to revelation.

    Gods silence is not that; but rather why he doesn't say or do something like he did with Paul's conversion experience; why an omnipotent deity seems impotent (and God forgive me if that is a blasphemy; but I don't say that of the true God, only of a certain idea of him).

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    The earless Dionysus Lutiferre's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Monolith View Post
    Luti, life is not supposed to be easy, we're not supposed to be all knowing, and every single action we make, however insignificant it might seem, while we live on this piece of rock determines who we really are. If the world we live in is filled with evil, which in turn is caught in a seemingly endless cycle of death and destruction, then what do you think, what is the most valuable thing to be found in it?
    Well, I don't think it is necessarily. If Christianity is not true, then there is no "problem of evil"; then the world is not "filled with evil"; then what Christians have condemned as evil is simply a necessary part of existence, which, like joy and sorrow and pain and pleasure, we must take both at the same time: good and evil, yin and yang, making up one whole.

    Quote Originally Posted by Monolith View Post
    If we lived perfect lives, with nothing troubling us, would there be anything to conquer? Would there be any obstacle for us to overcome? What would be the point of such existence?
    I agree fully.. and my point of doubt is exactly that Christianity denies that evil is a necessary part of existence, and relegates it to a "free will" choice of our own, while creation and God are only "good", not "evil"; only mans choice is "evil".

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    I've read all your reasons for not believing. But what were your reasons for wanting to believe?

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    Veteran Member Amapola's Avatar
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    Let him be or do whatever he wants. As Trog said, he has been searching, life will probably bring him back to religion for the "potencial" in him exists... Actually I was surprised that being so young he was into religion. There is a Spanish saying, *perhaps more universal than just Spanish* that says something like this: a person in his 20's that is not "left-wing" has no heart but a person that is still left-wing at an old age has no brain, hehe ... well something similar happens to religion... many convinced atheists have called out God's name previous moments before their deaths (and it's pretty common) so... just let him be.

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    The earless Dionysus Lutiferre's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Trog View Post
    I've read all your reasons for not believing. But what was your reasons for wanting to believe?
    I still have reasons to want to believe. I still want to believe.

    One reason was the deep intuition of a higher existence; indeed, an otherworldly hope. Another was the longing of my whole being after the meaning and meaningfulness in Christ and Christianity.

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    The earless Dionysus Lutiferre's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Alana View Post
    Let him be or do whatever he wants. As Trog said, he has been searching, life will probably bring him back to religion for the "potencial" in him exists... Actually I was surprised that being so young he was into religion. There is a Spanish saying, *perhaps more universal than just Spanish* that says something like this: a person in his 20's that is not "left-wing" has no heart but a person that is still left-wing at an old age has no brain, hehe ... well something similar happens to religion... many convinced atheists have called out God's name previous moments before their deaths (and it's pretty common) so... just let him be.
    I was very left-wing when I was even younger. But I don't think I would be different from most Catholic saints age-wise, or indeed from Jesus, who was debating with the Rabbis at twelve.

    But I will still be interested in religion, philosophy, metaphysics, and so on, even if losing faith in Christianity.

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    The Old Guard Smaland's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lutiferre View Post
    Well, I appreciate you trying, but I already know Christian teaching with regard to revelation.

    Gods silence is not that; but rather why he doesn't say or do something like he did with Paul's conversion experience; why an omnipotent deity seems impotent (and God forgive me if that is a blasphemy; but I don't say that of the true God, only of a certain idea of him).
    I am only speculating, but perhaps a dramatic conversion experience was necessary for Paul. In his ignorance, Paul was directly and energetically persecuting Jesus, and so the Savior may have had no choice but to "shut him down," at least temporarily.

    God is certainly omnipotent, but He does not need to say everything with thunder and lightning, to make sure that we understand Him and know that He is there. I do believe that He prefers to express Himself more calmly and more quietly. Sometimes, we may be in such a mental whirl that this drowns out what He is trying to say.

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    The earless Dionysus Lutiferre's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Smaland View Post
    God is certainly omnipotent, but He does not need to say everything with thunder and lightning, to make sure that we understand Him and know that He is there.
    Well, he does actually, at least if he wanted people to know he is there. As long as there are ignorants who don't know he is there, you would then be forced to claim that they do know every truth of the Christian faith; and if not, then they certainly don't know "He" as in the Christian God, is there.
    Quote Originally Posted by Smaland View Post
    I do believe that He prefers to express Himself more calmly and more quietly. Sometimes, we may be in such a mental whirl that this drowns out what He is trying to say.
    But that explanation is just so much weaker on the scale of immediate experience, than the overwhelming fact of absence, silence, and nothing.

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    How would you have expected God to show to you that he is there, that he exists? Because this is the true test of faith.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Trog View Post
    How would you have expected God to show to you that he is there, that he exists? Because this is the true test of faith.
    Well, first of all, it isn't really a question I, by Christian standards, can answer. There, it's a question you can only ask God. "The Lord works in mysterious ways".

    But, generally speaking, we speak about Gods creation, including me; I would have expected that God created a world that is "good" by Christian standards, which Christianity claims, but which fails to be true, for which reason all evil is brushed off as human sin, while natural evil before humanity even existed is simply ignored, or it's evil denied, which seems to have created the very human nature (evolution) that denies Gods existence and lusts, hates and murders as a part of natural selection. I would have expected that God created such a world, in which we knew by nature and grace that specifically the Christian God existed, if he indeed had created us and our nature, and we had no need of doubts. For Satan does not doubt.

    My point is summarised in this:

    4. Christianity Predicts a Different Universe

    I mentioned before that the Christian hypothesis actually predicts a completely different universe than the one we find ourselves in. For a loving God who wanted to create a universe solely to provide a home for human beings, and to bring his plan of salvation to fruition, would never have invented this universe, but something quite different. But if there is no God, then the universe we actually observe is exactly the sort of universe we would expect to observe. In other words, if there is no God then this universe is the only kind of universe we would ever find ourselves in, the only kind that could ever produce intelligent life without any supernatural cause or plan. Hence naturalist atheism predicts exactly the kind of universe we observe, while the Christian theory predicts almost none of the features of our universe. Indeed, the Christian theory predicts the universe should instead have features that in fact it doesn't, and should lack features that in fact it has. Therefore, naturalism is a better explanation than Christianity of the universe we actually find ourselves in. Since naturalism (rejecting the supernatural) is the most plausible form of atheism I know, this is what I shall mean by "atheism" from here on out.[8] Let's look at a few examples of what I mean.
    Origin and Evolution of Life

    First, the origin of life. Suppose there is no God. If that is the case, then the origin of life must be a random accident. Christians rightly point out that the appearance of the first living organism is an extremely improbable accident. Of course, so is winning a lottery, and yet lotteries are routinely won. Why? Because the laws of probability entail the odds of winning a lottery depend not just on how unlikely a win is--let's say, a one in a billion chance--but on how often the game is played. In other words, if a billion people play, and the odds of winning are one in a billion, it is actually highly probable that someone will win the lottery. Now, if the game is played only once, and the only ticket sold just happens to be the winner, then you might get suspicious. And if the game was played a billion times, and each time only one ticket was sold and yet every single time that ticket happened to be the winner, then you would be quite certain someone was cheating. For nothing else could explain such a remarkable fact.

    Therefore, the only way life could arise by accident (i.e. without God arranging it) is if there were countless more failed tries than actual successes. After all, if the lottery was played by a billion people and yet only one of them won, that would surely be a mere accident, not evidence of cheating. So the only way this lottery could be won by accident is if it was played countless times and only one ticket won. To carry the analogy over, the only way life could arise by accident is if the universe tried countless times and only very rarely succeeded. Lo and behold, we observe that is exactly what happened: the universe has been mixing chemicals for over twelve billion years in over a billion-trillion star systems. That is exactly what we would have to see if life arose by accident--because life can only arise by accident in a universe as large and old as ours. The fact that we observe exactly what the theory of accidental origin requires and predicts is evidence that our theory is correct.

    Of course, we haven't yet proven any particular theory of life's origin true. But we do have evidence for every element of every theory now considered. Nothing about contemporary hypotheses of life's origin rests on any conjecture or assumption that has not been observed or demonstrated in some circumstance. For example, we know porous rocks that can provide a cell-like home were available near energy-rich, deep-sea volcanic vents. We know those vents harbor some of the most ancient life on the planet, indicating that life may well have begun there. And we know these vents would have provided all the necessary resources to produce an amino-acid-based life, and that they had hundreds of millions of years of time in which to do so. In a similar way, we have evidence supporting every other presently viable theory: we know homochiral amino acids can be mass-produced in a supernova and thus become a component of the early comets that bombarded the early Earth; we know that amino acids that chain along a common crystalline structure in clay will chain in a homochiral structure; we know simple self-replicating chains of amino acids exist that do not require any enzymes working in concert; and so on.[9] So by the rules of sound procedure, the accidental theory is well-grounded in a way intelligent design theory is not. We have never observed or confirmed the existence of any sort of divine actions or powers that God would have needed to "create" the first life--nor have we demonstrated the existence of any such agent, not even indirectly (as we have for natural theories of life's origin). So the intelligent design theory is completely ad hoc, in exactly the way our accidental theory is not, and is therefore not presently credible.

    The situation is even worse than that, really. For the Christian theory does not predict what we observe, while the natural theory does predict what we observe. After all, what need does an intelligent engineer have of billions of years and trillions of galaxies filled with billions of stars each? That tremendous waste is only needed if life had to arise by natural accident. It would have no plausible purpose in the Christian God's plan. You cannot predict from "the Christian God created the world" that "the world" would be trillions of galaxies large and billions of years old before it finally stumbled on one rare occasion of life. But we can predict exactly that from "no God created this world." Therefore, the facts confirm atheism rather than theism. Obviously, a Christian can invent all manner of additional "ad hoc" theories to explain "why" his God would go to all the trouble of designing the universe to look exactly like we would expect it to look if God did not exist. But these "ad hoc" excuses are themselves pure concoctions of the imagination--until the Christian can prove these additional theories are true, from independent evidence, there is no reason to believe them, and hence no reason to believe the Christian theory.

    The same analysis follows for evolution. The evidence that all present life evolved by a process of natural selection is strong and extensive. I won't make the case here, for it is enough to point out that the scientific consensus on this is vast and certain.[10] And as it happens, evolution requires billions of years to get from the first accidental life to organisms as complex as us. God does not require this--nor does taking so long make much sense for God, unless he wanted to deliberately fabricate evidence against his existence by planting all the evidence for evolution--all the fossils, all the DNA correlations, the vast scales of time over which changes occurred, everything. Again, there is no credible reason to believe the Christian God would do this, and no actual evidence that he did. In contrast, the only way we could exist without God is if we live at the end of billions of years of meandering change over time. Lo and behold, that is exactly where we observe ourselves to be. Thus, atheism predicts the overall evidence for evolution, including the vast time involved and all the meandering progress of change in the fossil record, whereas Christian theism does not predict any of this--without adding all manner of undemonstrated ad hoc assumptions, assumptions the atheist theory does not require.

    Even DNA confirms atheism over Christianity. The only way life could ever arise by accident and evolve by natural selection is if it was built from a chemical code that could be copied and that was subject to mutation. We know of no other natural, accidental way for any universe to just stumble upon any kind of life that could naturally evolve. Also, as best we know, the only chemicals that our present universe could accidentally assemble this way are amino acids (and similar molecules like nucleotides). And it is highly improbable that an accidentally assembled code would employ any more than a handful of basic units in its fundamental structure. Lo and behold, we observe all of this to be the case. Exactly as required by the theory that there is no God, all life is built from a chemical code that copies itself and mutates naturally, this code is constructed from amino-acid-forming nucleotide molecules, and the most advanced DNA code only employs four different nucleotide molecules to do that. The Christian theory predicts none of this. Atheism predicts all of it. There is no good reason God would need any of these things to create and sustain life. He could, and almost certainly would, use an infallible spiritual essence to accomplish the same ends--exactly as all Christians thought for nearly two thousand years.

    Again, the only way a Christian can explain the actual facts is by pulling out of thin air some unproven "reason" why God would design life in exactly the way required by the theory that life wasn't designed by God--a way that was demonstrably inferior to what he could have done. Either God must have a deliberate intent to deceive, which no "good" or "loving" God who "wanted" us to know the truth would ever have, or God has some other motive that just "happens" to entail, by some truly incredible coincidence, doing exactly the same thing as deceiving us into thinking he doesn't exist, which at the same time just "happens" to require adding needless imperfections in our construction. In the one case, Christianity is refuted, and in the other it becomes too incredible to believe--unless the Christian can prove from actual evidence that this coincidental reason really does exist and really has guided God's actions in choosing how to design life and the universe it resides in. The possibility is not enough. You have to prove it. That has yet to happen.

    We can find more examples from the nature of life. For example, a loving God would infuse his creation with models of moral goodness everywhere, in the very function and organization of nature. He would not create an animal kingdom that depended on wanton rape and murder to persist and thrive, nor would animals have to produce hundreds of offspring because almost all of them will die, most of them horribly. There would be no disease or other forms of suffering among animals at all. Yet all of these things must necessarily exist if there is no God. So once again, atheism predicts what we see. Christianity does not.
    The Human Brain

    As a more specific example, consider the size of the human brain. If God exists, then it necessarily follows that a fully functional mind can exist without a body--and if that is true, God would have no reason to give us brains. We would not need them. For being minds like him, being "made in his image," our souls could do all the work, and control our thoughts and bodies directly. At most a very minimal brain would be needed to provide interaction between the senses, nerves, and soul. A brain no larger than that of a monkey would be sufficient, since a monkey can see, hear, smell, and do pretty much everything we can, and its tiny brain is apparently adequate to the task. And had God done that--had he given us real souls that actually perform all the tasks of consciousness (seeing, feeling, thinking)--that would indeed count as evidence for his existence, and against mere atheism.

    In contrast, if a mind can only be produced by a comparably complex machine, then obviously there can be no God, and the human brain would have to be very large--large enough to contain and produce a complex machine like a mind. Lo and behold, the human brain is indeed large--so large that it kills many mothers during labor (without modern medicine, the rate of mortality varies around 10% per child). This huge brain also consumes a large amount of oxygen and other resources, and it is very delicate and easily damaged. Moreover, damage to the brain profoundly harms a human's ability to perceive and think. So our large brain is a considerable handicap, the cause of needless misery and death and pointless inefficiency--which is not anything a loving engineer would give us, nor anything a good or talented engineer with godlike resources would ever settle on.

    But this enormous, problematic brain is necessarily the only way conscious beings can exist if there is no God nor any other supernatural powers in the universe. If we didn't need a brain, and thus did not have one, we would be many times more efficient. All that oxygen, energy, and other materials could be saved or diverted to other functions. We would also be far less vulnerable to fatal or debilitating injury, we would be immune to brain damage and defects that impair judgment or distort perception (like schizophrenia or retardation), and we wouldn't have killed one in every ten of our mothers before the rise of modern medicine. In short, the fact that we have such large, vulnerable brains is the only way we could exist if there is no God, but is quite improbable if there is a God who loves us and wants us to do well and have a fair chance in life. Once again, atheism predicts the universe we find ourselves in. The Christian theory does not.[11]
    Finely Tuning a Killer Cosmos

    Even the Christian proposal that God designed the universe, indeed "finely tuned" it to be the perfect mechanism for producing life, fails to predict the universe we see. A universe perfectly designed for life would easily, readily, and abundantly produce and sustain it. Most of the contents of that universe would be conducive to life or benefit life. Yet that is not what we see. Instead, almost the entire universe is lethal to life--in fact, if we put all the lethal vacuum of outer space swamped with deadly radiation into an area the size of a house, you would never find the comparably microscopic speck of area that sustains life. Would you conclude that the house was built to serve and benefit that subatomic speck? Hardly. Yet that is the house we live in. The Christian theory completely fails to predict this--while atheism predicts exactly this.

    The fact that the universe is actually very poorly designed to sustain and benefit life is already a refutation of the Christian theory, which entails the purpose of the universe is to sustain and benefit life--human life in particular. When we look at how the universe is actually built, we do find that it appears perfectly designed after all--but not for producing life. Lee Smolin has argued from the available scientific facts that our universe is probably the most perfect universe that could ever be arranged for producing black holes.[12] He also explains how all the elements that would be required to finely tune a perfect black-hole-maker also make chemical life like ours an extremely rare but inevitable byproduct of such a universe. This means that if the universe was designed, it was not designed to make and sustain us, but to make and sustain black holes, and therefore even if there is a God he cannot be the Christian God. Therefore, Christianity is false.

    Smolin explains how a universe perfectly designed to produce black holes would look exactly like our universe. It would be extremely old, extremely large, and almost entirely comprised of radiation-filled vacuum, in which almost all the matter available would be devoted to producing black holes or providing the material that feeds them. We know there must be, in fact, billions more black holes than life-producing planets. And if any of several physical constants varied by even the tiniest amount, the universe would produce fewer black holes--hence these constants have been arranged into the perfect combination for producing the most black holes possible. The number and variety and exact properties of subatomic particles has the same effect--any difference, and our universe would produce fewer black holes. Christianity predicts none of these things. What use does God have for quarks, neutrinos, muons, or kaons? They are necessary only if God wanted to build a universe that was a perfect black hole generator.

    Think about it. If you found a pair of scissors and didn't know what they were designed for, you could hypothesize they were designed as a screwdriver, because scissors can, after all, drive screws. In fact, there is no way to design a pair of scissors that would prevent them being used as a screwdriver. But as soon as someone showed you that these scissors were far better designed to cut paper, and in fact are not the best design for driving screws, would you stubbornly hang on to your theory that they were designed to drive screws? No. You would realize it was obvious they were designed to cut paper, and their ability to drive screws is just an inevitable byproduct of their actual design. This is exactly what we are facing when we look at the universe: it is not very well designed for life, though life is an inevitable byproduct of what the universe was more obviously designed for: black holes. So if the universe was intelligently designed, it clearly was not designed for us.

    But that is not the only explanation. If the universe was indeed perfectly designed to sustain and benefit life--if the whole cosmos was hospitable and beneficial--that would be evidence it was intelligently or supernaturally designed, since only an intelligent or supernatural being would ever have such a goal in mind. But this does not follow for black holes. Smolin explains why. Black holes possess all the same properties that our own Big Bang must have possessed before expanding into the present cosmos, so it seems likely that every black hole might produce a new universe inside it. Smolin then demonstrates that if every black hole produces a new universe slightly different than its parent, then our universe is the inevitable outcome of literally any possible universe that could arise at random. If any universe emerges randomly from a primordial chaos, no matter what arrangement of particles and physical constants that universe accidentally ends up with, it will always produce at least one black hole (even if only by collapsing in on itself), which in Smolin's theory will reset the whole slate, producing an entirely new universe with a newly randomized set of properties. This new universe will in turn produce at least one more black hole, and therefore one more roll of the dice, and on and on, forever. There is nothing that could ever stop this from continuing on to infinity.

    Some of these early random universes will just by chance have properties that produce more black holes than other universes, and will thus produce far more baby universes than their cousins do. The more black holes a universe produces, the more likely it is that some of the new universes this causes will also be good at making black holes, or even better. And eventually this chain of cause and effect will generate perfect or near-perfect black hole producers, after an extended and inevitable process of trial and error. Therefore, if the whole multiverse began with any random universe from some primordial chaos, eventually a universe exactly like ours would be an inevitable and unstoppable outcome. Hence Smolin's theory predicts exactly our universe, with all its finely tuned attributes, without any God or intelligent design.

    Now, Smolin's theory has yet to be proven. It is at present just a hypothesis--but so is Christianity. Just like Christianity, there are elements to Smolin's theory that are conjectural and not independently proven to exist. However, the most important element--the fact that unintelligent natural selection can produce incredibly precise fine tuning over time--has been proven, whereas any sort of divine activity has not. We have never observed a single proven case of a god causing anything, much less any fine-tuning of the properties of our universe. But we have found overwhelming evidence for a process that produces very amazing fine-tuning without any intelligence behind it, and that is evolution by natural selection. This is a known precedent--unlike bodiless minds or divine causation. And a theory based on known precedents is always less ad hoc than a theory based on completely novel and unobserved mechanisms. So Smolin's theory already has an edge over creationism.

    Even so, there are still some ad hoc elements to Smolin's theory, and therefore it is not yet a fact, just a hypothesis. But suppose for a moment that Smolin's theory is the only possible way our universe could come to exist without a God. It is certainly one possible way. No Christian can yet refute Smolin's theory or prove it is not the correct explanation. There are also other theories now that explain our exact universe without a God, like chaotic inflation theory. But let's assume we ruled out all those alternatives, and all we had left was Smolin's theory and the Christian's theory. Then, if Christianity was false, Smolin's theory would necessarily be true.

    Now observe the facts: the universe is exactly the way Smolin's theory predicts it would be, right down to peculiar details--such as the existence and properties of obscure subatomic particles, and the fact that the universe is almost entirely devoted to producing and feeding black holes, is almost entirely inhospitable to life, and almost never produces life. Christianity predicts none of these things, and in fact many of these details seem quite improbable if Christianity is true. In contrast, atheism would predict every single one of those details, exactly as we observe. Once again, Christianity predicts a different universe than the one we have--while atheism predicts exactly the universe we have. This even extends to the Big Bang theory itself. In no way does Christianity predict God would "create" a universe with a long deterministic process from a Big Bang. But if Smolin's theory is the only possible explanation of our universe without God, then it necessarily follows that our universe must have begun with a Big Bang and evolved slowly over many eons. Yet again, atheism predicts a Big Bang universe. Christianity does not.

    Even aside from physics, the nature of the world is clearly dispassionate and blind, exhibiting no value-laden behavior or message of any kind, and everything we find turns out to be the inevitable product of mindless physics. The natural world is like an autistic idiot savant, a marvelous machine wholly uncomprehending of itself or others. This is exactly what we should expect if it was not created and governed by a benevolent deity. Yet it is hardly explicable on the theory that there is such a being. Since there is no observable divine hand in nature as a causal process, it is reasonable to conclude there is no divine hand. Conversely, all the causes whose existence we have confirmed are unintelligent, immutable forces and objects. Never once have we confirmed the existence of any other kind of cause. And that is strange if there is a God, but not at all strange if there isn't one. Nowhere do we find in the design of the universe itself any sort of intention or goal we can only expect from a conscious being like us, as opposed to the sort of goals exhibited by, say, a flat worm, a computer game, or an ant colony, or an intricate machine like the solar system, which simply follows inevitably from natural forces that are fixed and blind.

    Given the lack of any clear evidence for God, and the fact that (apart from what humans do) everything we've seen has been caused by immutable natural elements and forces, we should sooner infer that immutable natural elements and forces are behind it all. Likewise, the only things we have ever proven to exist are matter, energy, space, and time, and countless different arrangements of these. Therefore, the natural inference is that these are the only things there are. After all, the universe exhibits no values in its own operation or design. It operates exactly the same for everyone, the good and bad alike. It rewards and craps on both with total disregard. It behaves just like a cold and indifferent machine, not the creation of a loving engineer. Christianity does not predict this. Atheism does.

    The Original Christian Cosmos

    A Christian might still balk and ask, "Well, what other universe could God have made?" The answer is easy: the very universe early Christians like Paul actually believed they lived in. In other words, a universe with no evidence of such a vast age or of natural evolution, a universe that contained instead abundant evidence that it was created all at once just thousands of years ago. A universe that wasn't so enormous and that had no other star systems or galaxies, but was instead a single cosmos of seven planetary bodies and a sphere full of star lights that all revolve around an Earth at the center of God's creation--because that Earth is the center of God's love and attention. A complete cosmos whose marvelously intricate motions had no other explanation than God's will, rather than a solar system whose intricate motions are entirely the inevitable outcome of fixed and blind forces. A universe comprised of five basic elements, not over ninety elements, each in turn constructed from a dizzying array of subatomic particles. A universe governed by God's law, not a thoroughly amoral physics. A universe inhabited by animals and spirits whose activity could be confirmed everywhere, and who lived in and descended from outer space--which was not a vacuum, but literally the ethereal heavens, the hospitable home of countless of God's most marvelous creatures (both above and below the Moon)--a place Paul believed human beings could live and had actually visited without harm.

    That is, indeed, exactly the universe we would expect if Christianity were true--which is why Christianity was contrived as it was, when it was. The first Christians truly believed the universe was exactly as Christian theism predicted it to be, and took that as confirmation of their theory. Lo and behold, they were wrong--about almost every single detail! Paul truly believed that the perfect order of the heavens, the apparent design of human and animal bodies, and the perfect march of the seasons had no other explanation than intelligent design, and in fact he believed in God largely because of this, and condemned unbelievers precisely because they rejected this evidence.[13] But it turns out none of this evidence really existed. Christians have long abandoned their belief that the perfect order of the heavens can only be explained by God, since they now know it is entirely explained by physics and requires no intelligent meddling or design. And a great many Christians have abandoned their belief that the apparent design of human and animal bodies can only be explained by God, since they now know it is entirely explicable by natural evolution.

    All the evidence we now have in hand only compounds Paul's error. For what we know today is exactly the opposite of what Paul would have expected. It is exactly the opposite of what his Christian theory predicted. Paul certainly would have told you that God would never use billions of years of meandering and disastrously catastrophic trial and error to figure out how to make a human. God would just make humans. And Paul certainly believed that is exactly what God did, and surely expected the evidence would prove it. But the evidence has not. It has, in fact, proved exactly the opposite. Likewise, Paul naturally believed God simply spoke a word, and Earth existed. One more word, and the stars existed. That's exactly what the Christian theory predicts. But that isn't what happened.

    Again, Christians can fabricate excuses for why God did things differently--but that's all just ad hoc. Like Christianity, none of these excuses have been demonstrated to be true. It is even doubtful such excuses would be compatible with Christianity. As noted earlier, God can do essentially anything, so what he does is pretty much limited only by what he wants to do. Christianity says he wants us to be good and set things right, which entails that God wants us to know what is good and how to set things right. Christianity says God wants to do what is good, and his choices are guided by his love of love and his hatred of hatred--therefore anything he designed would be the good and admirable product of a loving being. There is no way to "define away" these conclusions. If any of these conclusions are false, Christianity is false. But these conclusions entail that certain things would be true about our universe that are in fact not true.

    The existence of a divine creator driven by a mission to save humankind, for example, entails that his creation would serve exactly that end, better than any other. And that means he would not design the universe to look exactly like it would have to look if God did not exist. Instead, if I wanted people to know which church was teaching the right way to salvation, I would lead the way for them by protecting all such churches with mysterious energy fields so they would be invulnerable to harm, and its preachers alone would be able to work miracles day after day, such as regenerating lost limbs, raising the dead, or calming storms. The bibles of this church would glow in the dark so they could always be read and would be indestructible--immune to any attempt to mark, burn, or tear them, or change what they said. Indeed, I would regard it as my moral obligation to do things like this, so my children would not be in the dark about who I was and what I was about, so they would be able to find out for sure what was truly good for them.

    So, too, the Christian God would design a universe with moral goals built in. For example, if I were to make a universe, and cared how the people in it felt--whether they suffered or were happy--I would make it a law of nature that the more good a person really was, the more invulnerable they would be to harm or illness, and the more evil, the weaker and more ill. Nature would be governed by survival of the kindest, not survival of the fittest. Obviously, such a law would not be possible unless the universe "knew" what good and evil was, and cared about the one flourishing rather than the other. And unlike mere survival, which does its own choosing through the callous mechanism of death, if the very laws of the universe served a highly abstract good instead, that would be inconceivable without a higher mind capable of grasping and caring about all these deep abstract principles--as we know humans do, and the universe does not. So a physical law like this would indeed provide good evidence the universe was created by a loving God.

    But, lo and behold, that is not the universe we live in. Even if a God made this universe, it could not be the Christian God because no God who wanted us to know the truth would conceal it by making a universe that looked exactly like a universe with no God in it. The simple fact is that Christianity does not predict our universe, but a completely different one. Atheism, however, predicts exactly the kind of universe we find ourselves in. So the nature of the universe is another failed prediction, confirming our previous conclusion that Christianity is false.

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