Yes--and that reward will be what? I believe it will be, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant." Getting a commendation from Jesus Christ is incredibly worthwhile--because it comes from the One who is totally worthy.
Calvinism is a Cult
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Yes--and that reward will be what? I believe it will be, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant." Getting a commendation from Jesus Christ is incredibly worthwhile--because it comes from the One who is totally worthy.
The evidence is all around you. The complexity of life and the information it contains, speaks of a divine intelligence and designer.
Actually it isn't. If I give the glory to Christ for the good work of giving to a homeless person, then the homeless person will be thankful to Christ and not to me.
If I don't give the glory to Christ, then he will thank me and there will be no eternal value to what I did; but I will have the satisfaction of having been thanked.
On the other hand, if the glory goes to Christ, that often leads to the homeless or poor person placing their faith in Christ for salvation...and they will go to heaven as the result.
But if I do not give the glory to Christ, I have the satisfaction of being thanked by the person, but the person may very well go to hell instead of heaven. What good then was the temporal alleviation of their suffering? It will make no difference to their experience of eternity, except that they may look back on that as a moment in which they experienced good, and would add to their regret (over having rejected Christ) because they now can experience good no longer.
Thus the thing that you thought was a good deed would have turned out to be an evil one.
A commendation is a commendation, and a reward is a reward. You have focused on the commendation, but we are not told as to what exactly those rewards will be. In one parable Christ speaks of making his faithful servants rulers over *many cities*. That could even represent rule over many nations, or even many planets. We just don't know enough. But let's not confuse commendations with rewards.
That is not evidence for a creator. We have a scientific answer for how life began and became complex. There is no evidence that life was created by a god. The existence of anything alone does not prove how it got there. Additional evidence is needed. Science provides that, religion does not.
Do you have statistics to back this up?
This kind of thinking leads to ideas like suffering is good, or they deserve not to be helped etc. I am not saying you think this way. Eternal life needs to be demonstrated or at least given sufficient evidence for its existence.
Only if your god exists.
I don't know if five loaves and two fishes feeding over 5,000 people will convince you...
If that will not convince you, then statistics are irrelevant, and what matters is faith.
Hebrews 11:1 tells us that faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen...
Therefore my faith in Christ before you, is evidence to you that He is real.
It is not that suffering is good, but that God works out even suffering to the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.
It may be difficult for me to demonstrate eternal life to you over the medium of the internet, but if I showed you tangible love and gave glory to Christ then that is eternal life being demonstrated. However you might pass it off as not being evidence, since you yourself give to the poor being an atheist, and therefore you may not see that practical love being exhibited as being from Christ to you and demonstrating eternal life. And therefore if someone who were an atheist showed you temporal compassion, you would see it as evidence that real compassion coming from God is not from the love of God...thus it would be an evil work rather than a good one, considering the fact that God does exist (and that your unbelief concerning this fact does not change this fact one iota). Because you would not see eternal life as it is demonstrated as being what it is, since you are blinded by the seeming good deeds of humanitarians who do not know God.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that He does.
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It IS evidence for a Creator--I guarantee that you DO NOT HAVE a "scientific answer for how life began and became complex." A massive amount of information would be needed and from where did that information come? You have believed a lie.
How do you account for the fact that everything in the ecology is dependent on everything else?
How did such complexity develop from a single-celled organism? How did the life that developed know to diversify in such a manner as to create the ecology that we see today?
How do you account for male and female and the probability of reproduction with this anomaly in mutation, wherein if things had just remained asexual the probabilities of survival are increased a thousandfold? how or why did this mutation survive, when the asexual organism is so much more apt to be able to reproduce in the realm of probability? You would think that the male-female mutation would have died out immediately.
You are right. I misspoke. We do not have a good answer for how life began. We have a reasonable answer as to how it became complex. There is much more evidence that evolution took and in taking place today than a god created everything.
The Holy Spirit tells me that it is fleshly to focus on rewards. We won't get to strut around heaven with crowns on our heads. The Bible depicts the Lord's faithful laying their Crowns at the foot of God's throne.
I wanted statistics on your claim that often people will come to believe in god if they are helped by a Christian. If you can provide sufficient evidence that Jesus fed 5000+ people I would be interested in that.
So I should believe god exists because you believe he does? Would you believe in big foot just because I do?
I agree whatever I think does not change the fact of whether god exist or not.
How?
There is the testimony of scripture...and if you will not accept the testimony of those who believe, there is even an unbelieving historian...Josephus...who testified to the reality of Jesus' miracles and the reality of the fact that He lived, died, and was purported to rise again.
Of course my testimony would only be subjective to you...but He has revealed Himself to me in such a way that I would never doubt His existence in a million years.
Evolution is not directed. It makes sense through evolution that everything is dependent on each other in nature. Nature changed together through interactions with each species on the same planet. Evolutionary scientists have better answers than me on these questions.
But it didn't. I am probably not qualified to answer these questions very well. But even if evolution never happened that says nothing as to the claim that a god exists. My lack of faith that a god exists is not linked to evolutionary theory being true. I don't know 100% if it is true but it seems to be the best answer we have with the most evidence to support it.
Oh, poppycock. There is no "reasonable answer"--the "RNA World" hypothesis has failed. You MUST deal with origins, if you are to be believed. How did the genetic information come about in the first place? If you are speaking of natural selection through gene mutation, I'm sure you know that the overwhelming majority of gene mutations are deleterious to the species in which they take place. When genetic mutations build up in the genome of any species, to approximately 3%, that species is on a glide path to extinction.
There is also the problem of the paucity of "transitional forms" (if there are any at all). Stephen Jay Gould recognized the absence of transitional forms and came up with his theory of "punctuated equilibrium" to explain their absence, but that is even sillier than "gradualism".
The fact is that the Bible is correct when it states, in Genesis, "Dying you will die." (which is the actual translation from the Hebrew). Over half of all plant species which ever lived are now extinct and the animal species are not far behind. Mutations are accelerating because of the toxins in our food, water and environment. Rather than life becoming more "ordered" it is becoming more "chaotic". Another word for that "chaos" is entropy and it is increasing in all plant and animal species. A good primer on genetic entropy has been written by John Sanford, Ph.D. He is a plant geneticist (he is independently wealthy from his invention of the "gene gun") but he has tackled the whole subject of genetic entropy in his book by the same name: Genetic Entropy (it has a longer title but I can't recall the rest of the title). Sanford feels that the human species is drawing uncomfortably close to the 3% mutational rate and he also explains why tinkering with the human genome, through various technologies, will NOT help. He says that all world-class population geneticists understand the problem but prefer not to speak of it. He interviewed a number of them for his book.
He has an interesting personal history. He was an atheist. But then, as he got further into his studies, he concluded that there is a complex design to life that could only come from a Designer. He was then a deist for a while before deciding that the Christian faith is the only faith that made sense.
While it is clear that species change slightly and adapt (to some degree--until they cannot adapt any further and then they become extinct) over time, that is a long way from saying that all life started out as a single-celled "animal" and "progressed" to man.
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No they don't. They just have more sophisticated untruths.
The Theory of Evolution (and it really shouldn't even be dignified by calling it a "theory"--it is more of a hypothesis) is simply NOT the best answer. The best answer is that there was and is a Creator.
p.s. The "Direct RNA Templating" hypothesis is failing as well: Meyer and Nelson on a Failed Explanation for the Origin of the Genetic Code | Evolution News
p.p.s. Here is another article you might find interesting:Darwin Devolves: Another Huge Advance Against Darwinism and for Intelligent Design | Evolution News
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Ah yes, "Hopeful Monster" theory...the concept that a bird might lay an egg and that out might come a donkey.
Job 11:12 (nkjv) For an empty-headed man will be wise, When a wild donkey's colt is born a man.
I dealt with it. My answer is I don't know.
I am not here to discuss evolution. I am not qualified to. It has no bearing on whether god exists or not. What is your evidence that god exists?
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