Texas teen dies rock climbing, two hours later he revives: 'A literal miracle'

Conveniently isolating a point AFTER there is an abundance of life from which to prune.

The militant atheist view holds that dumb luck driven by mindless gravity drove the explosive proliferation of life that enabled the hammer and chisel of natural selection to shape specific species.

That's some kind of deity they believe in!

Things just magically fell into place, accidentally, mindlessly, over and over again for millions of years...

Such fertile imagination makes ol sany claus look like a mere flower pedal in fairyland.

 

See my reply to coco.

 

I am not sure why invoking the mechanism of natural selection need be militant or atheist. However, I would probably accept the moniker of naturalistic.

I do agree that our current conception of the origin of life is weak, and for all I know it may never get much stronger. It’s a tough problem, but suggesting that all tough problems are either solved by God or magic seems overly cocksure about our current state of knowledge. Ptolemy’s system of celestial mechanics worked great before Copernicus. And his system was fantastic until Newton, whose ideas were the pinnacle of knowledge until Einstein, whose theory lasted only a couple years before Bohr and Heisenberg. History seems to show that we usually have more to learn.

Relatedly, your mocking comparison of the natural selection to Santa Clause again suggests that your own mind is the pinnacle of thought and imagination, where if you cannot imagine something, then everyone else who can must be loony. I still wonder why we should we start from this premise. As John Locke notes, a feeling of certainty cannot be a reliable indicator of truth: “For if the light, which every one thinks he has in his mind, which in this case is nothing but the strength of his own persuasion, be in evidence that it is from God, contrary opinions have the same title to inspirations. Then God will be not only the father of lights but of opposite and contradictory lights”

 

Well since you asked, I'll give it a go, with the caveat that this is all about a god I believe is completely hypothetical.

First off, how about a little bit more efficiency.
Start a universe some 13 billion years ago, then sit around strumming his fingers for about 9 billion years, while the universe expands beyond any size imaginable, with enormous and cataclysmic destruction of celestial bodies going on at a rate too high to count. Then picking out a tiny, tiny corner of it and creating Earth (a great home for his soon to be created greatest experiment, man). Wait another 4 billion or so years before starting on a rudimentary model of what will eventually become homosapiens. Once we start knuckle dragging around, then wait about 200,000 years or so before finally getting around to announcing himself, as celestial king. Then sending his son (who is also himself) to the most illiterate part of the world, a literal desert, full of completely uneducated sheep herders and such and deciding the best way to make a point is to kill him (I mean himself).

Other things I question about his "act".

Not condemning slavery right away. Seems obvious.
Promoting child sex slavery (see Numbers)
Advocating genocide too many times to count.
Ordering a father to kill his son to prove his allegiance (nice of him to rescind that one)
Advocating for the killing of homosexuals.
Flooding the earth and killing everyone on it because, well, he's pissed off.
Eventually engineering a world where the following of his son's teachings are somewhat geographically biased.
Torturing people (for all of eternity, mind you), for simply doubting he exists, among other unforgivable things. Among those, likely some of my loved ones from the past.
Demanding that we love him, or else.

I could go on (and on), but I think most will get the picture.

So basically, how do I think he should act? Let's start with not being a moral monster.

 

No idea. Ask them.

 

I didn't say YOU did, but since you asked, post #33 was pretty uncalled for and smelled of disdain for the poster you were responding to.

Regardless, I didnt say YOU were the one doing it.

 

If human beings are good and increasingly knowledgeable, how come there is so much suffering in the world? It’s not as is they haven’t had, what ? hundreds of thousands of years to eradicate suffering and still, thousands and thousands of babies die every day and the human race may have brought itself to the brink of thermonuclear extinction, slavery still exists, genocide reached it’s pinnacle in the century God was declared dead and now the Florida Gators have suffered back-to-back losing seasons for the first time in nearly half a century.

 

Because it's the same tired dodge used by militant atheists.

Point out a simple (enormous-like oceanic) gap in their reasoning, to simply ask that they meet me as far as to acknowledge that life is the fruit of some form of intelligence.

Can't even get that. Not once, in years of offering that most elementary of 'olive branches'.

Inevitably, the militant atheist comes back with "evolution", "natural selection", "gravity"...

Gravity explains how the elemental materials of life may have gathered;

Evolution and natural selection (and "survival of the fittest") only address how the forward direction of life may have been shaped.

...none of them come within half the universe, of even attempting to acknowledge that *something* propelled those raw ingredients to seek to evolve, to seek to exist, to seek to extend their existence, to become more complex, more sophisticated in design, better equipped to live, and to do so according to their environment...to proliferate--to make more of their own...

From these elementary facts, one must necessarily deduce the most elementary conclusion--that the *force* propelling such advancement of life (let alone its actual inception), was intelligent or at least born of intelligence.

Else you necessarily subscribe to the *lucky as hell, to the infinite power* Fairy.

Of course the militant atheist always, vehemently denies this.

(as you've done--you want to couch the denial of such preceding intelligence 'naturalistic').

Sorry....if you deny intelligence preceded life, then you affirmatively declare that intelligence itself, developed accidenttally....from life, which of course itself would have had to develop and evolve---accidentally.

 

continuing (had to change venue)...

Weak, sure, but I don't think I ask too much for the mere concession of acknowledging that intelligence didn't accidentally come about; intelligence preceded life. That is a matter of the most elemental deductive reasoning.

Because the alternative is so patently absurd.

Except that the comparison isn't to natural selection. That is exactly the problem.

I'm talking about the architect---there is an architect (or engineer, or author, or artist)...

...and the militant atheist inevitably counters with a tools used in the construction process ("gravity", "natural selection", "survival of the fittest" = hammers, saws, pens/paint brushes...).

What's more, I'm not even asking anyone to pretend to know anything about the archtect;

...just that sophisticated designs do not happen accidentally.

(or again, at least own what you are proclaiming--because IF you deny that life is the fruit of intelligence, THEN you necessarily proclaim and declare that it came about accidentally, according to dumb luck and mindless fortuitous occurrences. Again...simple deductive reasoning. IOW, to deny that intelligence yielded life, is to proclaim that life came about absent intelligence. Which is what? By accident. (and again, even more absurdly, but just as necessarily, that INTELLIGENCE itself, happened/came about, accidentally)).

Sure. Setting aside the fact that I never denied God light to my atheist counterparts (they do that themselves)--when a light denies it is light...and proclaims that its own illumination is darkness itself--I simply cannot go along with such absurdity.

...and that's not throwing God in anyone's face; that's just pointing out how blatantly fallacious it is, to proclaim that intelligence came about accidentally.

 

pretty sure no god had anything to do with it. When someone grows a new limb; head; heart or their lower half miraculously reattached itself to the lower no miracles exist. Only magic that exists is natural phenomenon we have yet to explain. Always find it curious; god only heals intangible issues. Issues with no explanation. A regrown arm would get my attention; curing of cancer doesn’t; a guy with no physical injuries who passed out doesn’t either.

 

I think you hit on it (multiple times).. it’s a big accident. Repeated billion or trillions of times all over the universe over billions of years. Our light will go out in a blink of cosmic time.

EOD I guess

 

We are fly specks in a hurricane of random events with little ability to influence outcomes.
A sick kid heals - it’s a divine miracle. 1 million kids starve to death - it’s God’s will and we can’t expect to understand His will and infinite wisdom.
Is there no accountability?

 

Many like to suffer but at the same time attribute it to gods divine plan for them.

It’s so weird.

 

The straw man stands no chance in this thread.

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

Interesting take.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZqN_VrWeOVU

 

Incredible the amount of suffering human beings have brought upon themselves. Hundreds of thousands of years, of accumulated knowledge, and they can’t even regrow a limb.

 

Why do you have to link the theory of evolution to militant atheists? Would you be flabbergasted to know that there are evolutionists who believe in God? And the theory of evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life. It's a theory that applies to existing life. There are other theories that address how the universe and life began, but there is no scientific evidence of creation in the sense of God creating the universe and life. That is a matter of faith. I'll always rememer something that Billy Graham said when I heard him preach in person in the 1960s at Florida Field. He said, "I can't show you God in a test tube."

 

One must consider the biblical context. The God of the Bible being anthropomorphic in his depiction, the ancients modeled him after your typical Ancient Near Eastern king or potentate. Slavery, torturing people, ordering their deaths, etc., was just another day at the royal court.

 

It’s why I don’t do rope-a-dope apologetics anymore. Furnish a cogent response to one objection … and they’re off and running to the next.