Civil Discussion About Religion

[Schneed10]

Originally Posted by jsarno

FYI- thanks for toning down the posts...I feel you offer a good counterpoint to the arguments, so I would not like to see your posts ignored.
I agree that just because you can't see the wind, that is an arguement for the existance of God. I am glad to see you got the point as well.
I do firmly beleive that to prove the existance of God, you need look no farther than the mirror. A human being can not scientifically be proven. There are so many loop holes in how we started to where we are now from a scientific standpoint. How do we all of a sudden "adapt" to our surroundings, then grow stuff to accomodate? The human body is so complex that is could not have been by accident. I realize this is opinion, but so is evolution. (keep in mind I fully beleive in evolution). Evolution is not fact, it is theory...or opinion. After I am done looking at myself in the mirror to my beliefs that God exists, I look around the world at how everything fits just right. How can there be no other planet in all our explored galaxies that can sustain our life? How is it from the billions and billions or stars / planets, this is the ONLY one we can live on? The only one that has such a delecate system that we can actually wipe ourselves off the planet? It's just right, not too hot, not too cold, plenty of oxygen, plenty of sun light...perfect rotation, perfect revolution etc. It's just too much of a coincidence not to be from a higher design. The odds of all this being like this by coincidence is so astronomical I don't have enough space to place the odds. How can science honestly overcome those odds?

We haven't checked out all the planets in the universe. Because first off, many scientists believe, and this is a recent story, that life does/did exist on Mars (just not the kind of life we're used to: this life is Hydrogen Peroxide based as opposed to Water based).

If we could examine all the planets in the universe, there very well may be plenty that we can live on.

Secondly, I bolded a section of your post above because it is most alarming. It appears that you don't understand evolution at all. Evolution is not a person's ability to adapt to it's environment. And we definitely didn't do it all of a sudden. Take a skunk's ancestor. The way it works is 99.999% of those animals are born completely normal, similar to the rest of the population. Then there will be one skunk born with the ability to spray smelly crap all over a predator, freaking him out, and scaring him away. That skunk has sex with other skunks. The genetic trait gets passed down. That keeps happening until the predators eventually stop attacking the stinky skunks, and they kill off all the normal ones. This takes generations and generations.

It's not that we can adapt that quickly. It's that every now and then, we make a baby that can survive something the others can. And he passes that trait on until it dominates the population.

Maybe you knew that, maybe you didn't. But I felt the need to clarify the theory.

The other bolded part I noted was your section saying to prove the existence of God, look in the mirror. That's not proof. That's your belief.

Let's get our definitions right:

Prove - to establish the truth or genuineness of

Believe - to have confidence in the truth, the existence, or the reliability of something, although without absolute proof that one is right in doing so