(Follower;60250)
God created a universe, but you would rather to believe that the universe just happened.
How do you know what I would rather or not?
You mentioned something about medically-verifiable faith healings, unique to one group. Like all the evidence of God that is rejected, if healings were additional evidence, they'd likewise be rejected. For example, you might reason that psychic energy is doing the healing, not God. The reason only one group can do it is because they're the only ones practicing the rituals that open the necessary brain pathways.
If you think I'm simply rejecting evidence out of hand, well that is certainly your right to do. But why would you think this? Do you reject the miracles of other religions out of hand? Why or why not?My point was that all the different groups who claim their religions are correct and their Gods are real cannot all simultaneously be true. You agree with this, yes? But if one group is somehow misattributing things to the truth of their beliefs, what is stopping all such groups from being wrong?I think if one particular group had a monopoly on the miracle claims, then that would be much better evidence that they were correct. Do you agree?
How about DNA? Some Atheists have suggested that maybe Aliens created it.
One specific group are the Raelians:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%ABlism I think they are just as nutty as you do
No scientist has even the beginning of a working theory to create the DNA necessary for the first life.
Not quite true, for example the RNA World hypothesis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis
But, according to common Atheist philosophy, the possibility of God cannot even be considered.
Well, if the philosophy is specifically an atheist one, it is not surprising that God isn't considered. A specifically Christian philosophy wouldn't consider the possibility of Ganesha either.
But that doesn't mean that an atheist cannot consider the possibility of God. Do you see the difference?
Even if there is something you couldn't understand, you wouldn't want to bring science to a halt by saying God did it.
Again you talk about what I would or would not want. How do you know what I want?If "God did it" is a good explanation with good evidence behind it, then rationally I'd have to agree with it. I have no problem changing what I believe to fit the evidence.
(Contrary to such reasoning, science doesn't halt just because someone has a wrong theory. But, science does halt when scientists refuse to consider something for a priori reasons.)
I think this is a rather misunderstood idea. It isn't so much that science can't consider God as a mechanism for some phenomena, but a lack of science's ability to test such a hypothesis involving God. In science, an untestable hypothesis is pretty useless. But as I'd alluded to in an earlier post, if God answered questions reliably and audibly, then God's involvement most certainly
could be tested and would be very useful in science.
Using your analogy, you have one hand, even though you can examine what you're holding, you don't know if it's A or A+B. The issue is, what is in your hand, A or A+B? You say you're going to figure that out by comparing it to the other hand, which you know is the opposite (one hand is A+B and the other is A). The trouble is, you have only one hand.
I think you're missing the point I was trying to make. Both ideas are hypothetical. We don't discover the difference between them at the start, we declare that they are different and we look for what some of those differences might be. One possible difference would again be that miraculous healings and happenings only happen to one type of believer. Another possible difference would be if the laws of the universe made life impossible, but yet here we were anyway. If you cannot find any differences at all, then there is no reason to believe the two ideas are different. If the ideas are not different, then adding God to one idea doesn't account for anything.I'm sorry, I don't think I can explain any better than that, we may just have to agree to disagree on this one.
You said, "The world with God seems to be indistinguishable from the world without God." I asked how can you say that when you've never seen the other world to make that comparison.
Perhaps I can give a better example: If I were to form a hypothesis that lightning was an electrical phenomena, as opposed to, say, an electrical one plus the involvement of invisible lightning beings, I would have two hypothetical possibilities, right? One where lightning was electrical, one where lightning was a combination of electrical phenomena and the involvement of the lightning beings. In order to test this hypothesis, I don't have to have seen purely electrical lightning on the one hand, and electrical plus lightning being lightning on the other. All I would need to test the hypothesis is to come up with possible differences between the two ideas, and then look for those differences. If I could find no difference, then rationally the electricity alone version would be more correct.A question for you, are you really saying that there is no testable difference between a universe with God and a universe without one? That's fine if you are, but that would be unexpected.
A tree is just being a tree. It's not doing anything special to prove something to you. You want God to do something special.
Where did I say it had to be something special? I just said it had to be something objectively verifiable. Again, that is the key. I am not discriminating against God in this, I expect everything that exists to give objectively verifiable evidence of its existence. Is that an irrational expectation in your eyes?
