A_Wanderer said:
The issue of the universe possibly being one of many makes a very big difference to its origins.
What I meant was, you are still left with the question- where did the universe(s) come from and why is/are it/they here?
Incontravertable evidence for the existence of God would be seeing evidence that God made the universe, seeing God interact in our universe, literally seeing some divine intervention to prove the existence of God. Until I see that God creating the universe is on equal footing as toby the magical toasted cheese sandwich inventing the universe over a cup of steaming pepsi cola or me claiming that I made the universe and I chose to make myself human and my powers are undetectable because I used them to make it appear that I was normal - all of these are not falsifiable which disqualifies them as being scientific. Now evolution is falsifiable, if we observed that life was static and that all that we see in the fossil record was somehow fake then it would be reevaluated, if we found that mutations did not occur then such questions would be raised and the validity of evolution as a theory would be questioned and the most accurate explaination for the evidence would become accepted. God does not factor into science because God is a rogue element that is not falsifiable and not scientific.
Love your "Toby the magical toasted cheese sandwich" quote
However, this is my main disappointment in my dealings with atheists. They instantly put the concept of God into the fanciful moronic basket along with santa claus, the easter bunny and little green men from mars. I disagree with you in the strongest way that God is not falsifiable, at least the Christian understanding of God.
How so I hear you ask? We'll the whole of Christian spirituality stands or falls on one particular historical event. Or more specifically on one particular person - Jesus. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that our evidence for Jesus is contained for the most part within the bible. Although not just within the bible, there are many extra-biblical accounts of the life, teaching and actions of this remarkable man. But there are a number of objections people tend to make about the bible, many of them before even having read it, let alone studied it's reliability.
Firstly people assume the message has been lost in the translation. The fact is that most bibles available today are taken directly from the original languages- Hebrew, Aramaic and Ancient Greek. Our knowledge of these languages is getting more and more precise which means that translations are actually getting more acurate.
The next objection some people raise is that it's been changed. In this arguement people claim that the scribes who copied and passed on the ancient bible documents decided to change the stories to suit themselves. But again this is just hopelessly ignorant. We have in our possesion hundreds of ancient copies of the gospel of mark (for example) found in many different places all over the ancient world. If it had been deliberately embelished there would be an abundance of ways to demonstrate this- I mean it's not like the Athenian scribe could fax his chnages through to his mates in Jerusalem, Rome and Corinth and get them to make the changes too. Of course there is also the issue of motive- scribes believed they were dealing with God's word- something sacred.
Others argue it contains accidental mistakes. The fact is mistakes were made, here's an example:
"They (Jesus and his disciples) went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes." (Mark 5:1) So what? The problem is, the various ancient copies (remember we've found heaps) differ on the spelling of this region. Some have it "Gardarenes" others "Gergesenes". Obviously some scribe somewhere stuffed up. As a result scholars now have to sift through the many ancient copies and work out which is the most likely spelling. Of course this is not the only 'mistake' in the ancient copies of the Bible but the others are only about as life-changing as this one.
I'm sorry if I am going over stuff you are already aware of but the reason for this brief biblical examination is so we can get to the crux of the issue. Sure you may say, the bible is a reliable account, but it's an account of some religious wackos who were trying to pass off a bunch of crap about a guy they decided to make a messiah. Maybe the bible is just a well preserved lie.
The first thing to remember is that the gospels are based on eye-witness accounts, two of them were written by men who personally knew or interviewed eye witnesses, the other two were men who travelled and worked with Jesus for over 3 years. The second thing to remember is many of the eye witnesses were either imprisoned or executed for proclaiming what they'd seen.
What caused these people to really believe they'd seen Jesus teach, heal, die and then rise again? There were hundreds who saw Jesus after the resurrection, many had been with him for over three years. Could it have been that they were all just seeing a very extended optical illusion? If they had simply made the whole thing up, why did they bother dying for a lie? It certainly wasn't for power, prestige or wealth- they were often despised and destitute. Even those who wern't killed for their claims, still had to endure family ridicule, loss of jobs and much persecution.
The authorities had every reason to want to discredit this zealous jewish sect (as they would have viewed it)- it posed a threat to their authority because Jesus had made claims about his deity and authority and this movement of early christians was making it's presence felt. Jesus' resurrection was falsifiable in that all the critics had to do was produce the body, but they did not.
I have barely touched the plethora of evidence for the claims of and about Jesus. Many a more intellegent person than I have sought to examine these issues with the greatest of scientific and historical dues process. Some like British journalist and legal expert, Frank Morrison, set out to do the world a favor by once and for all exposing the superstition of Christ's resurrection. However, by using the test of evidence permitted in a court of law, he became convicted against his will of the truth of the resurrection, and detailed his findings in a book still in print entitled Who Moved the Stone.
The conclusion I have to come to based on the available evidence is that God indeed has indeed intervened in the world in the most remarkable of ways.
Now I apply the same standard to my views on evolutionary biology, the evidence for mutations exists, the fossil record demonstrates change and this is backed up by experimental evidence
You would have to concede there are some pretty glaring gaps in the fossil record. I think a more reasonable approach would be to see evolution as the best scientific guess.
Evolution is independent from cosmology, the questions of the universe. I do not put faith in these things, I make a reasoned deduction based upon what facts that we have and the facts regarding evolution lead me to think that evolution occurs. The facts regarding God is that man has worshipped the sun and moon or tribal God images long before monotheism came into being, we have always had religion to explain things that we do not understand and that belief is just a cheat to solve the questions of existence.
Are these really the only facts regarding God? I think not- have you actually gone to the source material and checked the claims of christianity?
As for the origin of the universe I think that its questionable if it even had an origin, if it is infinitely old then it never had a beginning and that is a possibility. The problem for us is that we cant wrap out minds over the concept of infinite and we seem to demand answers that make sense in the context of 3 dimensions and time, anything more just makes our brains hurt.
But can you see the lack of logic in not pursuing this? I mean if you are right and God is just a figment of my imagination- what have I lost? But if I am right- what have you lost?
