GOD EXISTS

Daryl,

I was not raised in a religious household. I was born to a nominally Catholic parents in Indonesia, a predominantly Muslim nation. We moved to the US before I turned 6. I was agnostic until my 20's.

Belief in God began as I answered the "Why" question or perhaps questions. The most important being "why are we here?" Science describes the Big Bang but not the primal cause. Was that cause intentional? All the existing laws of nature argue that something cannot come from nothing. Matter and energy are conserved. Where then did the universe come from? Something had to predates creation. That something changed nothing, a void, into something, our universe. If that something is unintentional, it follows our universe exists within a larger environment that governs the creation of our universe. If this is true, that larger universe also exits within a larger environment ....and so on and so on. At one point all creation had to begin from Something. Nothing unintentional can come from nothing. Nothing means nothing and chance is not nothing.

The next question was easier. What was that Something? Answering this was easy. The Bible describes creation the most accurately of all creation myths out there. TontoSillerheels posted a time line of the Big Bang and Genesis that matches remarkably well. Considering God had to use Bronze Age concepts to capture His Revelation, Genesis was dead on describing the Big Bang.

I agreed wholeheartedly with the morality throughout the Bible, but I was raised to believe that morality. Yet, even here the validity of these core principles was supported by the Creation these moral codes were meant to govern. The more societies adopted These codes, the more those civilizations prospered.

None of this is proof. Yet all of this led a curious agnostic to believe that he was created intentionally to help accomplish a purpose. That purpose is found in the Bible's New Testament.

As confusing at it seems, our current understanding is that there is no 'before' or 'place'where the big bang could occur, as the big bang happens to be the start point of space and time. it wasn't nothing, as nothing is the gap between things, but the true abscence of everything.

PeterZ wrote:Daryl,

I was not raised in a religious household. I was born to a nominally Catholic parents in Indonesia, a predominantly Muslim nation. We moved to the US before I turned 6. I was agnostic until my 20's.

Belief in God began as I answered the "Why" question or perhaps questions. The most important being "why are we here?" Science describes the Big Bang but not the primal cause. Was that cause intentional? All the existing laws of nature argue that something cannot come from nothing. Matter and energy are conserved. Where then did the universe come from? Something had to predates creation. That something changed nothing, a void, into something, our universe. If that something is unintentional, it follows our universe exists within a larger environment that governs the creation of our universe. If this is true, that larger universe also exits within a larger environment ....and so on and so on. At one point all creation had to begin from Something. Nothing unintentional can come from nothing. Nothing means nothing and chance is not nothing.

The next question was easier. What was that Something? Answering this was easy. The Bible describes creation the most accurately of all creation myths out there. TontoSillerheels posted a time line of the Big Bang and Genesis that matches remarkably well. Considering God had to use Bronze Age concepts to capture His Revelation, Genesis was dead on describing the Big Bang.

I agreed wholeheartedly with the morality throughout the Bible, but I was raised to believe that morality. Yet, even here the validity of these core principles was supported by the Creation these moral codes were meant to govern. The more societies adopted These codes, the more those civilizations prospered.

None of this is proof. Yet all of this led a curious agnostic to believe that he was created intentionally to help accomplish a purpose. That purpose is found in the Bible's New Testament.

Thank you for emphasizing the issue. Absent everything, something was created. Nothing that wonderous can be unintentional.

Here is that link to Tonto's post for those interested.

http://forums.davidweber.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3292&hilit=genesis&start=160#p123528

Spacekiwi wrote:As confusing at it seems, our current understanding is that there is no 'before' or 'place'where the big bang could occur, as the big bang happens to be the start point of space and time. it wasn't nothing, as nothing is the gap between things, but the true abscence of everything.

PeterZ wrote:Daryl,

I was not raised in a religious household. I was born to a nominally Catholic parents in Indonesia, a predominantly Muslim nation. We moved to the US before I turned 6. I was agnostic until my 20's.

Belief in God began as I answered the "Why" question or perhaps questions. The most important being "why are we here?" Science describes the Big Bang but not the primal cause. Was that cause intentional? All the existing laws of nature argue that something cannot come from nothing. Matter and energy are conserved. Where then did the universe come from? Something had to predates creation. That something changed nothing, a void, into something, our universe. If that something is unintentional, it follows our universe exists within a larger environment that governs the creation of our universe. If this is true, that larger universe also exits within a larger environment ....and so on and so on. At one point all creation had to begin from Something. Nothing unintentional can come from nothing. Nothing means nothing and chance is not nothing.

The next question was easier. What was that Something? Answering this was easy. The Bible describes creation the most accurately of all creation myths out there. TontoSillerheels posted a time line of the Big Bang and Genesis that matches remarkably well. Considering God had to use Bronze Age concepts to capture His Revelation, Genesis was dead on describing the Big Bang.

I agreed wholeheartedly with the morality throughout the Bible, but I was raised to believe that morality. Yet, even here the validity of these core principles was supported by the Creation these moral codes were meant to govern. The more societies adopted These codes, the more those civilizations prospered.

None of this is proof. Yet all of this led a curious agnostic to believe that he was created intentionally to help accomplish a purpose. That purpose is found in the Bible's New Testament.

PeterZ wrote:And yet science has yet to prove something other than a conscious being is the primal cause of Creation. No hypothesis has been tested and generated sufficiently predictable results to warrant a theory and certainly not enough to warrant a law describing the nature of that primal cause.

And the intellectually honest response to this state of affairs is "we don't know this yet, we'll work on it."

Science is working on it, and as the effort continues we get a better and better look further and further back in time at what really happened.

Religion on the other hand declares "Aha! Therefore a magic super-being did it! Because we said so!"

"Thank you for emphasizing the issue. Absent everything, something was created. Nothing that wonderous can be unintentional."

An assertion unsupported by any level of either evidence or logical argument.

Hutch wrote:Those words (Hypothesis, Theory, Law); I don't think they mean what you think they mean.
Let's try to define terms here (from wikipedia):

yes cause Wiki is sooo reliable - that's why college professors insist on having it as one of your citations on every paper...oops that's no citation on any paper. I don't think it means what you think, lest try a more scholarly source:
Theory:

in scientific terms, is actually several hypotheses that have been extensively tested and have a large amount of data to back them up. A scientific theory has not been disproven even though many experiments have been done on it over long periods of time...
This does not mean that new data that is found could not contradict a theory and cause more testing. Theories may be disproven if new experiments give different results than what is expected.

Law:

A law (also called a universal principle, universal law, or a scientific law) is a theory that holds true everywhere in the universe and govern the way nature works. This is the highest order in the progression of scientific thought and was once a theory that explains the natural order of the universe...

Daryl wrote:Science versus religion.
One enables us to make computers, cars, aircraft and other complex stuff that works well. The other seems more interested in passing the collection plate and sometimes killing others

WRONG - they are principles not people - they have no interest, no more than a gun or hammer - what someone uses it for is not what it is "interested" in - no more than a gun is interested in killing people and a hammer is interested in building a house - how many hammers have been used to kill people? quite a few threw-out the millennia, & how many people have been killed in the interest of spreading anti-religion hate? (as your statement seems to drip with) both the NAZI under Hitler/Himmler and the Communists under Stalin persecuted religious members under the same excuse. In reality it was their own egos - (If God exists then I'm not the ultimate power in the country - Can't have that!) - This is where most anti-religious sentiment comes from.

Spacekiwi wrote:As confusing at it seems, our current understanding is that there is no 'before' or 'place'where the big bang could occur, as the big bang happens to be the start point of space and time. it wasn't nothing, as nothing is the gap between things, but the true [absence] of everything.

Then there could be no Big Bang or Universe - if there was an "absence of everything" then there is nothing to get anything from - energy can neither be created or destroyed - there was no "THIS" universe - that means there has to have been something else for the energy of the universe to come from. There can't have been absolutely "Nothing". The fact that there is a Universe is indisputable proof that there was not nothing before.

MAD-4A wrote:yes cause Wiki is sooo reliable - that's why college professors insist on having it as one of your citations on every paper...oops that's no citation on any paper. I don't think it means what you think, lest try a more scholarly source:

As a general tip, when you make claims you are citing a "more scholarly source" citing the source is a good idea. Would you care to share what it was?

Judging from the way it's defining the terms I have some doubts about the quality of the source you pulled this from. Saying a Law is "the highest order in the progression of scientific thought" is... well, absurd really.

gcomeau wrote:...a magic super-being...

Magic means "in a way we don't understand" so - yea - we don't understand & can't. It makes me think of several references in Sci-Fi (at-least 1 in StarTrek) where they contact an Alien race who is so different from humans that we can't even comprehend there mental working, Yet you pretend to be able to understand the mental workings of a being who creates universes? I don't think so. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

gcomeau wrote:As a general tip, when you make claims you are citing a "more scholarly source" citing the source is a good idea. Would you care to share what it was?

A Bazooka Joe bubblegum comic is "more scholarly" than Wiki.