who decided there should be clouds and electrons and then made them.
If I reverse your approach onto you, I must demand that you prove that "Nobody did." is a wrong statement.
No religion ever produced reproducibility or controlled experiments. - Why should it?
If religious thought wants to match up to scientific inquiry, it must. You yourself said you believe in the scientific method. Then you must pony up.
No religion can predict anything. I beg to differ. The Bible spoke of Hittites, and archeologists eventually found evidence of them. It told us of King David and Pontius Pilate long before their names were discovered in period inscriptions. Then there are the actual prophecies of the Bible. Some fulfilled, some not yet realized.
That is not a prediction, but a simple historical record. A scientific prediction is calculating what WILL happen based on immutable laws and the particular initial conditions. For example, predicting that a ball will not bounce higher than the level from which it was dropped, how far a bullet will travel, where a spacecraft must fire its engines to end up at a particular location, how to set up EM fields to make charged particles travel in certain ways etc.
What they do not understand, they call "miracle". No. We call miracles those things which we believe were caused by the direct intervention of God. By that token, we understand what has happened.
This pushes into the "free will" problem. If the divine acts in every act, then there cannot be miracles or free will. If the divine does not always act, then free will and miracles might exist, but then there are "ordinary" things in which the divine has no part. If so, then why do we need the divine to explain most, even all, of the observed phenomena. It is a very slippery sloap beyond that door.
Again, why do you expect religion to help you understand how to wire your house or map the human genome?
I will reverse the question to ask: " If a belief system is incapable of making things happen and predicting natural behavior on the commonplace scale, why does it make sense that it is capable of tackling successfully far greater and more difficult problems, such as the nature of the unverse itself?" It is like saying that a sportsman is incapable of lifting 100 lbs but can juggle 300 lbs bowling pins.
Priests cannot do jack, they cannot heal, they cannot resurrect, they cannot move mountains, they cannot even fly. Strictly speaking, I agree with you.
Yet they say they understand the unverse better than scientists do, although the latter can do all those things by use of their knowledge and tools.
My religion claims that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. This could have been proven wrong, and never has been.
How could it be proven wrong? Proving negative. Just because it cannot be proven wrong, does not mean it is right.
In fact, there is no other explanation that fits the facts.
Historical facts are related by people, who as we know can and quite often are, wrong. Here is an equally possible explanation - the "witnesses" imagined or made it up. Please disprove that possibility. If you cannot, it must be true?
I should have said they had to emerge from nothing. Where is scientific observation on that score?
Actually the microwave cosmic background is the chief scientific evidence for the Big Bang. If you doubt it, you can measure it yourself. The CMB is uniform to a mindboggling level of accuracy.
Currently, I do not know what the "thing" was that blew up. But, that temporary ignorance does not prove the divine in any way.
Here is a simple (silly) hypothesis to think about: a cyclic universe that oscillates between expansions and contractions, with each new period starting with a bigbang. No beginning and no end. Where is the divine there? Can you prove we do not live in such? If you cannot, does this mean we do live in such?
No, we think like God. Created in His image, and all that stuff. Why is it bad to claim that we have some similarities to God?
Some might say that is hubris. I'd say we are weak, mortal, fallible, often ugly, sometimes sickly, etc. etc. Should we conclude that the divine shares these characteristics? If not, what do we share? Thinking patterns? Most people don't think much or well. Things don't look good for the divine.
Last I knew, that was the original basis for the concept of human rights.
They can be argued with no reference to the divine but through a simple "social contract" expedient. One might argue historically they had to be argued the other way, because royal power had been based on religious annointment.
If the machinery is set up and in motion, where is the "divine will"? Its in the laws, the machinery.
Then why do we need the divine? It seems laws suffice. In fact that can be considered immutable traits of the unverse itself, without sentience or intent.
Does the divine will break its own laws to do something extraordinary? Finally, you ask a good question. Miracles do not violate natural laws. If I am falling off a cliff and a net is there to break my fall, no laws are broken. Gravity is not offended, it is still pulling me down. However, my body was acted on by another force that overcame its pull until I slowed down or stopped moving. In the same way, gravity is not cheated when an invisible divine hand catches me and lowers me gently to the Earth.
What would that "force" be? Is it a natural force? It seems you believe it is not. Then, do we need the divine for all natural forces? It seems like we do not. Then how do we know the natural is part of the divine? Also, if we cannot observe or measure that "force", how do we know it exists?
But if it is, then there is no free will. Now THAT is a can of worms. An all-powerful all-knowing God who created all things, how can anything escape being in His control? Many Chrisitans do NOT believe in free will. The Calvinists are best known for this. The other side is typified by the Armenians. I belong to the latter group. So, free will is not necessarily part of this dogma. I hope this points out to you that you dont understand the Christian doctrine you are trying to debunk.
Then the nonfreewillers have a fundamental contradiction in their doctrine concerning good and evil, while the freewillers believe the divine is limited in power and knowledge, and so run into different problems. Are these even the same religion?
Mind explaining that autocatalytic thing? Cool word. Are you saying that life starts itself?
If you have a soup of chemically-non-interacting nutrients and let it be for an arbitrary time in complete isolation, you'll still end up with the same soup at the later date. If you introduce a bacterium in the same soup, you will find a large colony of bacteria and a much more complex soup at the later date. In this sense, any particular step in evolution or "life-generation" would only need to happen once in the huge primordial ocean, for its consequences to propagate throughout it in a highly nonlinear, likely exponential, fashion. This self-promoting property of organisms significantly cuts down on the time required by combinatorics.
So youre admitting that scientists cannot and have not reproduced the phenomenon they claim to have such certainty of?
We have not reproduced species-formation on the large-animal scale because we cannot accelerate time (yet), do not have an entire planet to do an experiment with, and cannot yet control all parameters in a planetary environment to reproduce all conditions. But, random mutagenesis and forced evolution are now standard tools in microbiology. If what has been done with bacteria can be extrapolated to large animals, then we have.
No evidence of the existence of the divine. Thats what I thought you meant. You have already decided that science will explain away anything supernatural. I thought you said science was unbiased.
I do not know if it will in the future. But, applying the method onto the current evidence produces the stated result.
No, sir. You ignore the evidence of the fossil record. An almost-total lack of transitional forms. A pre-Cambrian explosion that all but screams, This all happened at once!
As best we can tell, the explosion is a reality. But it does not prove there was nothing before it, and that seems to be your conclusion. I can offer a number of alternative explanations that have nothing to do with the divine. For example, a period of particularly strong solar winds or external radiation, a radioactive asteroid, etc. etc., can significantly increase the rate of random mutagenesis in the genetic makeup of relatively small number of species, making them expand into many new ones over what seems a minute in the big scheme of things. Autocatalysis would significantly shrink the temporal requirements.
And the fossils are buried in strata that are frequently found in the wrong places for an old-earth theory of geology. I.e., old strata on top of younger, on top of older on top of younger.
You know about tectonics and you have made an omlette in your life.
What do you mean by spontaneous creation?
Life generation by natural laws and probability, without divine intervention.
DNA contains information that tells the organism how to build itself, no? Information does not come from out of nowhere especially not the very complex codes of DNA. Again, Darwins age had no concept of this.
Please prove why the DNA could not have appeared naturally and gradually reached its current length by mutagenesis and evolution. In fact, current molecular biology indicates that simpler organisms have shorter DNA and simpler biochemical mechanisms, which are often a subset of the ones found in more highly-evolved organisms.
he basis of my conclusion is reason and observation. When confronted with various possibilities, one selects the likely explanation, not the one that is on the far edge of likelihood. Given the difficulties that natural processes would have to overcome to make evolution work, (if one even grants that evolution can explain the irreducible complexity pointed out by Intelligent Design research) the supernatural is a better, more logical, indeed, more scientific explanation than the natural.
So IDs believe in the divine because it is the more likely? Unfortunately, they are multiplying their probability estimate by a completely unknown variable - the probability of existence of the divine itself. The inequality is strongly dependent on that value. I say it is unknown because I cannot measure it. They believe in the divine and thus assign that value to be unity. That is the trick that allows them to get a final result > mine.
Ockhams razor butchers unnecessarily complicated and convoluted theories, such as evolution.
Occam's razor cannot be applied to theories with unknown components. It simply compares the complexity of theories known component by known component. If we have two theories that are otherwise equally complex, but one of them also has an unknown component, then Occam discards the latter. The divine is the eternal wild card, that makes a theory that includes it unmeasurable by mathematics or probability.
