Is Jesus's "this generation will certainly not pass" valid grounds for scepticism?

arthwollipot said:
What's more likely - that one version of Christianity is right and 39,999 versions are wrong, or that 40,000 versions are wrong?

That's not the only reason I left the church though. The other was the realisation that no process in the universe required the existence of a deity in order to proceed. God was redundant.
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I can see all of that.

For me, magic can't be the answer for everything or anything. But that isn’t wasn't why I left my church. I was willing to view it all metaphorically. In fact I did for years. I left because after really reading the Bible from the beginning I was unable view God as a forgiving loving being any more. Jesus is mostly portrayed as loving and forgiving in verse after verse in the New Testament. He seems to be the person we should all want to be.

It's not the ridiculous horrible laws in the Old Testament. It wasn't even the absurdity of the Genesis story. I could accept that too was metaphorical. No, it was just how awful God is. He's not forgiving. He's not loving. He's truly horrible. He has no admirable traits. God is emblematic of all of man's worst attributes. He's petty, he's spiteful. He's narcissistic. He isn't wise.

He is an ego maniac. He requires praise and worship. Why would such a powerful being need sycophants? The story of Abraham is awful. So is the story of Jepthah and Lot. God is supposed to be just? And yet even though he deals harshly with anyone that breaks his laws, he essentially gives King David a free pass after David commits adultery with Bathsheeba and arranges for the death of her husband.

Reading the Old Testament left me with little reason to think any of this was inspirational any more.
 
arthwollipot said:
What's more likely - that one version of Christianity is right and 39,999 versions are wrong, or that 40,000 versions are wrong?

That's not the only reason I left the church though. The other was the realisation that no process in the universe required the existence of a deity in order to proceed.
God was redundant.
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So am I but it doesn't mean I don't exist! :p:cry:
 
ahhell said:
So am I but it doesn't mean I don't exist! :p:cry:
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No, but I don't think that's Art's point. God is not necessary. This violates the principle of parsimony. When presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction and both hypotheses have equal explanatory power, one should prefer the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions,.
 
arthwollipot said:
Well, it's an odd way of stating it. I don't think my church would be fundamentally in disagreement with it though.
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Okay.
arthwollipot said:
Poem, get this into your head: Every serious biologist accepts the reality of evolution. Every. Single. One.
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Where did I say otherwise?
arthwollipot said:
The ones that don't are creationists, and not biologists.
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Indeed.
arthwollipot said:
There may be minor disagreements on specific details of the hows and whys, but no serious biologist doubts it. There is a unified stance on evolution in the scientific community - that it is the only way to consistently explain the observations.
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Minor disagreement?

The Third Way Of Evolution:
The DNA record does not support the assertion that small random mutations are the main source of new and useful variations.
#476

That is an absolute rejection of the adequacy of the modern synthesis. What is modern synthesis? It is the contemporary explanation for evolutionary process that most biologists subscribe to.
arthwollipot said:
This is in fact one of the primary reasons I left the church.
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Right - and I too would argue that the disunity in the Church is valid grounds for scepticism.
 
Poem said:
Minor disagreement?
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Yes. Minor disagreement. Science is progressing all the time. Scientists discover new things, they reevaluate old things, but none of them support any conclusion other than that evolution is the only way to describe how organisms change over time. Inflating these minor disagreements as though they represent critical schisms in the scientific community is directly out of the creationist playbook.

For someone who claims not to be a creationist, you sure use their arguments a lot.
 
arthwollipot said:
Yes. Minor disagreement. Science is progressing all the time.
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You didn't demonstrate it's a minor disagreement.

If the modern synthesis is insufficient then potentially that leaves biologists without a consensus theory.
arthwollipot said:
Scientists discover new things, they reevaluate old things,
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That is true but then we have to ask why the biologists who say the modern synthesis is sufficient are resisting those that say it isn't?
arthwollipot said:
but none of them support any conclusion other than that evolution is the only way to describe how organisms change over time.
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Correct.
arthwollipot said:
Inflating these minor disagreements as though they represent critical schisms in the scientific community is directly out of the creationist playbook.
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Sure creationist do that. I'm not a creationist though.
arthwollipot said:
For someone who claims not to be a creationist, you sure use their arguments a lot.
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Not at all - and you know that because I quoted from a pro-evolutionary website.
 
Darat said:
Because we are not talking about science, we are talking about religions each of which claim to have the truth, therefore when talking about answers to questions about doctrine or theological questions you need to identify which specific religion you are talking about.
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If we aren't talking about science, why do you do so here?
Darat said:
What we can say however is the god most if not all Christian claim exists doesn’t because the evidence is against it. For example we know that humans weren’t created instantly and singularity .
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That is a reference to evolution.

The Church is split - we both agree with that...and you said yourself:
Darat said:
Do you not find the fact that the various Christian religions believe in different things a reason to doubt that any one of them has the truth?
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I have merely made the point that there is disagreement among biologists.
 
Poem said:
If we aren't talking about science, why do you do so here?

That is a reference to evolution.

The Church is split - we both agree with that...and you said yourself:

I have merely made the point that there is disagreement among biologists.
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No "the church" is not split.
 
Olmstead said:
First off, I had already been an atheist for a while when I accepted that there is no free will. Neither religion nor Darwin really had much to do with it, apart from the fact that I was perhaps more likely to follow a line of though to its most sensible conclusion, rather than blindly accept a comforting lie. I guess if I were Christian I could just say that God magically makes the illogical free will happen, and it's beyond our understanding, but that really isn't an answer.

As for what debunked the Bible for me, I don't think I ever truly believed in the Bible as such. I believed in God, and the Bible was sort of God's word, but also sort of wasn't, and the stuff in it sort of happened, but also sort of didn't. By the time I could have seriously analysed and questioned the Bible, I already questioned the concept of God itself: there was no sensible reason to believe in God, so I stopped.

The Bible didn't really stop me from believing, it just didn't stop me from abandoning my belief. It's one of the final stupid answers that comes up on the journey to lose one's faith. How do I know there's a God? Because the Bible says so. It's another statement that doesn't really answer anything.

Technically no book could have reasonably prevented the loss of faith, unless it pulled some seriously weird supernatural stuff, but it does help that the Bible is so stupid. It probably needed to be stupid. You can't really make a cult out of some "god concept" dreamed up by a philosopher.
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Why do we continue to punish criminals? No free will, no culpability.
 
Olmstead said:
Deterrence, prevention, and reformation. In theory anyway.
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Dawkins argues that the logical conclusion of his belief in a materialistic Darwinian universe is that there is no free will. Do you share that reasoning?
 
What is a "Darwinian universe"? As far as I know he didn't produce any theories or maths that described/modelled the universe.
 
Darat said:
What is a "Darwinian universe"? As far as I know he didn't produce any theories or maths that described/modelled the universe.
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Sure - it's more than Darwinism - but I also said materialism.

Cosmological evolution....that.

Would appreciate a response to previous posts.
 
Poem said:
Dawkins argues that the logical conclusion of his belief in a materialistic Darwinian universe is that there is no free will. Do you share that reasoning?
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Yeah, I don't know why you keep mentioning Darwin either. From what I know, Darwin was never even a materialist.

But yes, the logical conclusion of materialism is that there is no free will.

That is also the logical conclusion of the Christian belief system, and of every world-view ever imagined by man. The supernatural doesn't actually solve this issue.
 
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