Satan is fighting for what is right against a tyrant (God)

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Now Iam a mechanic, not a scientist, I hear one set of doma from one side, and another contrary for the other side, I therefore now am free to embrace my own views. I cannot therefore give you a complete answer to your questions, only repeat things I have heard from the Christian side.
The canopy would have been a sphere, in "nd Peter chapter 3 I belive is where it says, "the earth was in the midst of water, yet compactly standing out of water", and in Genisis, the waters below the firmament, (seas), and the waters above the firmament.
Now I have had it told to me, that there is such a thing as a thermosphere, and that it is still hot enought that scientists claim it could hold much of the earths water as a vapour.
I dont know if this is true as Ive never been up into space to check for myself.
Maybe forces we do not know about kept it in place?, the magnetic field?
As for where is all the water now?, well its now on the earth, thats why so much of the planet is covered in water, if God made the planet for men rather than dolphins, I would have expected it to have a lot more land than sea.
Interestingly in Psalms, it talks about the flood and how the water level went down where it says, "mountains proceeded to ascend, and valley plains proceeded to decend", indicating that the earth was also much flatter, but the weight of all that water on the earths crust caused the water to gradually pool at certain points, the weight of which pushed up the mountain ranges.

Its the herds of grass plain mammals, instantly frozen before thier flesh rotted that scientists can not explain, and that the removal of an insulating canopy that would explain it, that swings my choice of belief to the Biblical account, I havnt got to leave that part out for my own personal dogma.

Another interesting view that you guys might find entertaining, and not a Biblical belief, is the small earth theory, if you google it, you can find some animations.
What I like about this theory, is that with a smaller earth, there would have been less gravity, hense animals and vegetation would have been a lot bigger than they are now, and indeed they where.
Dinosaurs that we now say must have spent all thier lives in big lakes, supported by water else thier bones would have broken from thier weight, would no longer be the case with less gravity.

Another file worth watching is, [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGCxbhGaVfE[/youtube] where Ben Stien finds lots of Scientist who through thier study have come to the conclusion, that thier has to have been intelligent design, but these scientists cannot admit such for fear of losing thier carreers.
That tells me that thier is deliberate deciept going on in the scientific world, hense my lack of trusting in every "fact" they present us with to prove God doesnt exist.

Are you just trying to sound like a brain washed Jim Jones follower? I think I see your problem above.

Common lies:
"We can't expect to have the original documents for the Bible" - LIE: There are recovered original ancient documents far, far, far older then the Bible.

"The Romans had a census in 1BC like in the Gospel" - LIE: First there is not any evidence at all and the Romans would have not done something so insane and nonsensical as forcing people to travel in ether the winter or harvest time. Especially a people already prone to rebellion.

"Carbon dating is flawed" - LIE: Modern science has about a dozen radiometric dating techniques and multiple techniques are used to correlate with each other.

"Mammoths froze in the flood." - LIE: There is no evidence of water flow or erosion associated with the mammoth finds. It was just freezing in an unusual atmospheric phenomenon.

"Hitler and the Nazis where 'Atheists'" - LIE: Read some of Mine Kemph and the Beer Hall speeches.

"Israelite 'conquest' of the 'promised' land" - LIE: The archaeological evidence contradicts the entire notion. The Israelites/Jews where/always where Canaanites. And there is not one trace in the extensive record from classical Egypt of an enslaved nation or trace in the Sinai desert of a wondering displaced nation.

More flood problems:
- No higher sea life could have survived the mixing of salt and fresh water or the amount of sediment that would be stirred up in the water.
- Animal species are dispersed around the globe in patterns consistent with both evolution and continental drift.
- The ultra fast evolution and continental drift ideas do not work. If the continents moved any significant amount in such a short time the frictional heating would boil the oceans and steam sterilized the earth.
- There are cave paintings that are 40,000 years old as shown my lime stone growth over their surface. Yet they where not washed away 5,500 years ago?


And finely, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What evidence has ever been put forth for ANY claim of a 'supernatural' reality? Moreover if there is any so called 'evidence' is it any different from what any other religion can try to claim as 'evidence'?

1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism (Blocked outside the US)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPa5BEm4fI0[/youtube]
I advise watching the entire series.

Please note; I am not a YEC

This is patently false. Firstly censuses took years to complete (giving it a single year date like 1BC is silly, the one in the Bible was actually ordered in 8BC). Augustus ordered three censuses during his lifetime. He listed those three acts among his thirty-five greatest acts. Those acts were placed on two bronze plaques and set outside of Augustus's mausoleum.



The contentions that the Jews and the Canaanites are the same people is not settled historically. For example, there is evidence that there was an ethnic demarcation. Canaanites ate pigs, there is no evidence of this practice in Israeli towns and settlements. While it is clear that the Exodus did not happen in the literal manner stated within the book of the same name, it is highly difficult to confirm or deny the story. As I stated in relation to the city of Troy; there was a city that could confirm aspects of the story. It is highly difficult to prove or disprove the Exodus story since there is very little that can be analysed conclusively. It is also worth noting that the Egyptians if they had suffered an Exodus of their slave population would be any way inclined to record the event; they were WELL known to only write down things that glorified the Pharaoh. They did however record the event Manetho, an Egyptian historian corroborated large aspects of the story. An additional reason why one should be careful to totally dismiss the Exodus as some sort of historical event is that there are more than a dozen separate Ancient History sources for the event.




Ha, this is typical repetitive atheism. My personal favorite demonstration of this:

Excerpt from the debate between Lewis Wolpert (developmental biologist) and William Lane Craig (Christian philosopher and theologian)

Craig: God exists, here is the evidence.
Wolpert: God doesn’t exist, there is no evidence.
Craig: God exists, here is the evidence.
Wolpert: God doesn’t exist, who made God?
Craig: God does exist, he is an uncaused eternal being. Here is the evidence.
Wolpert: God doesn’t exist. He hasn’t done anything in the last 2,000 years.
Craig: That’s chronological snobbery. You don’t tell the time with an argument, you don’t tell if an argument is true or false, of if evidence is good or bad with a watch.
Wolpert: God doesn’t exist. We believe because we have a notion of cause and effect, this leads to toolmaking, and also to belief in God.
Craig: That’s the genetic fallacy. To confuse the origin of a belief with its truth or falsity. You need to deal with the arguments and evidence that I have presented.
Wolpert: God doesn’t exist. There is no evidence. Who made God?
Craig: Here is the evidence. God is an uncaused being. God does exist.
Wolpert: God doesn’t exist. There is no evidence.
Craig: God does exist. Here is the evidence.

*If you want to see the evidence, watch the debate

Wolpert has the better position. There is not an iota of evidence for the existence of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

ruveyn

I think you just proved my point.

Actually, I agree with Order and Chaos's argument.

I am not going to bother watching that debate though. I haven't heard good things about Wolpert as a debater, and I am familiar enough with Craig that the issue will go down to specifics. As it stands, I wouldn't consider Craig's philosophical arguments to count as "evidence", as "evidence" is usually considered to be empirical. The only issue that Craig could go to is the Resurrection as evidence. The problems with this are many though, as the resurrection leads us to consistency issues in evaluating historical occurrences. (an argument by philosopher Matt McCormick, who compares the resurrection to the Salem witch trials, which we generally regard as false)

I want to be sure I don't misunderstand. Are you saying that if you hear conflicting opinions on a subject, you feel justified in taking whatever opinion you like and concluding it is true?


I wouldn't call it the Christian side, because only a small minority of Christians agree with you. And if you can only repeat what one group tells you, are you not ignoring contrary evidence? Should I reject your theories because you leave out what doesn't fit?


You have offered what you consider evidence in favour of a global flood. If I countered by saying "maybe all this was caused by forces we do not know", would you say "I changed my mind, that is a perfectly plausible alternative to a flood!"


The Earth's magnetic field? That doesn't hold up a sphere of water.


Is there evidence that continental plates can move that far that fast? Or do you have to leave that out?


The lack of rotting is your evidence for instant freezing? I think you would need to look at how fast decay sets in, and how much there is. You can get meat from a butcher that has merely been cooled since the animal was slaughtered, perhaps days earlier, and there is little enough decay that you can safely eat it. No death by instant freezing is needed.


It doesn't. Deserts, with little water vapour above them for insulation, can show large temperature fluctuations between day and night, but the temperature change is still far too slow for instant freezing. There is just too much heat stored in the ground and there is a limit to how quickly it can radiate away.


You leave out the physics of heat transfer and the physiology of decay and empirical observations you can make today. You also leave out global effects. How big a temperature drop would you need for instant freezing? Shall we be generous and say a drop from +20C to -30C is close enough to "instant" for your purposes? It would still take hours for a moderately large animal to freeze solid, but let's call that instant. If your canopy was an insulator so efficient that its removal caused that large a drop in temperature, where did today's polar animals live before the flood? The planet must have been, on average, about 50C hotter. Nothing but a few thermophile bacteria would have lived in the tropics or subtropics. But aren't there fossils in those areas from layers you would consider pre-flood? Wouldn't the Bible have mentioned that enormous temperature drop?


If you want files worth your attention, try this link and listen to podcasts #074 and #076. There is a good case for the deception having been on Ben Stein's part. I have no way to find out whether or how much of it was deliberate.

You also leave out that a lot of scientists who have religious faith agree on data and interpretations that flat out contradict the biblical flood account. They just don't see this as proving that God doesn't exist. Why would all these scientists with religious faith have joined the atheists' alleged conspiracy of deception?

And here we have a typical apologist attempt at deflection. I certainly am aware that the Roman government used censuses. But the point is that there is no record of a census that required something as bizarre and nonsensical as forcing people to return to their town of birth to fill out a questionnaire. This is a tortured attempt by the Bible writers to shoehorn a historical rabbinical personality, possibly an attempted reformer, into Jewish messianic "prophecy". Its so painfully forced that at least it seems to indicate that Yashuah was a historical personage although almost completely lost under myth and legend.

You are missing a major point though regarding the Egyptian records. Like most civilizations a large percentage of documentation that was generated and survived was of a financial and economic nature. IF there was an entire enslaved nation of say close to a million slaves the evidence would exist in records of economic activities. Also Egypt is a tiny region along a river, its population was never vast, a well organized society in a very fertile area yes, but a sudden change in population as alleged in the Exodus would leave unmistakable archaeological evidence. Also in the history of Egyptian religion there is no evidence of the sort of damage control that would be necessary in the event of being so completely discredited as by the plagues.

Yes the Exodus could be based on a real historical event. There are some researches who put forth evidence that the story is based on the Hyksos tribe that was driven out of Egypt. But the extraordinary claims of the Bible could not have occurred with out leaving unmistakable historical and physical evidence. When a claim is big enough absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Even if any part of the Bible is based on historical events that still makes the supernatural claims no more real then harpies, cyclopes, the witch Cercie or the god Poseidon from the Odyssey. The core of being a rationalist is accepting that the Null Hypothesis is the one and only dividing line between fact and fiction. And supernatural claims like God fall far on the fiction side of the line.

Actually, debates like this are a waste of time, its like a blind man using the facts that are available to him, telling a sighted man that he cannot see, as there is no such thing as light, the sighted man knows that there is because he can see it, but the blind man never well so whatts the point?

Those of us who have a relationship with God, know he exists, when you pray and recieve the Holy Spirit, or when prayers get answered.

For instance.

My parents split up when I was 18 months old, I then alternated between Childrens homes and an abusive stepfather.
All contact with my real father was lost,
One day, and one day only, I prayed to God asking where my Father was, why couldnt I have a Father like other people, the next day I went to work and the girl opposite me, being bored, asked me whose name I wanted to look up as she had access to clent file, I gave my fathers name, she put it in her computer and it came up!, despite being a foriegner, he was living in England and had a policy with us, within days I met him, after not having seen him for 27 years.

When I told the girl the prayer I had said only the previous evening, despite not being religious she said, "Ive been used by God!"

Doubtless those of you who like to be shown "evidence" that God doesnt exist will find comfort in saying, "that was just a co-incidence", and oh!, how full of co-incidences are the lives of those who can see.

There is a scripture that says, "do not give your pearls to a swine least they trample them in the mud".

You do know that prayer studies have been done and those prayed for faired worse then control, don't you? So this "God" cares about sappy little reunions and not children suffering from incurable cancer? Even if there was any evidence that such an entity exists outside of human imagination and confirmation bias its priorities are perverted.

You know it too. There is nothing mysterious about morality and the alleged behavior of "God" is flatly opposite of moral choices. That being the case the point is what there actually is evidence for. There is evidence that human psychological projection exists and the "God" hypothesis is very convenient psychologically for "believers".



"The unexamined life is not worth living."
- Socrates

And had you been raised in a culture that believes in the wheel of Karma you would be dead certain that these events were attributed to your good deeds in a previous life.
Instead this reinforces your belief in the Abrahamic god and the mythological events of the bible.

Had the Greek gods been the dominant religion instead you would say that she was "used by Athena" and would use that event to reinforce the belief that the universe was created by Uranus and Gaia. And that Odysseus had really encountered cyclopeses.
Cyclopeses are no less ridiculous than Nelphim.

The first place you are going wrong is that you think that I am wrong, when in fact I am not. The modern definitions apply to all works. Date does not matter. Ancient fiction is still fiction.



I didn't read them the same way. All of the books that claim to contain facts seem to contain mostly fantasy and what is left of them contain a very biased look of history. The books that claim to contain rules are full of completely awful rules that are pro-slavery or sexist enough or just downright crazy enough. The books containing futuristic predictions are laughable at best.


I was wrong. I was meant to say that works that are 50% fiction are still fiction. By fiction I mean cute legends about super natural beings. The existence of the city of troy does not make Cyclops exist. Just like the existence of egypt's ruin does not mean an old man split the waters of a river by raising a stick.


If he actually believed so, he is dumb. If he discovered something from his bad assumption, it does not make it any less of a bad assumption.

and they remain right.

some elements of history? Completely tainted history mixed with fiction and legends does not really count as history. It is actually rather useless. The Illiad is 100% useless in regards to history. Oh sure, there were greeks, and there was a city of troy. But the book is useless at giving any hints as to why the war started or how it ended. I can tell you that it was not the gods that were angry or that it was not a silly faux romantic story.

The ancient testament and the oddissey are surely loosely based on reality, but in their attempts to entertain and control the masses they turned into really just legends. As legends they give some look into the minds of the people in the past. And have some excessively loose parts that may be true. The hebrews probably existed and committed all sorts of murderous wars to settle in what we call now their "promised" land. There was a city of troy which may or may not been part of a war. But other than that we can't really give any use whatsoever to those books to explain any part of history. As an example, the bible fails completely at leaving any evidence whatsoever that the hebrews were slaves in Egypt and the Illiad was completely useless at giving the location of Troy.

Well as to Wolpert being a bad debater, maybe he just has a bad argument? As to the contention that philosophical arguments not counting as evidence: I wonder would you be so dismissive if the evidence went the other way? I like Plantinga’s position on the subject when he compares the question of the existence of God to be similar to that of the existence of other minds. He points out that both are very difficult to prove to a determined skeptic.

As to the Christological argument based on the resurrection. Gert Lüdemann, the leading German critic of the resurrection, himself admits, “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.”. The argument is based on four facts about the events surrounding the crucifixion and the known historical events that followed it.

I also read Matt McCormick’s argument. A lot of it is pure rubbish. For example he argues that the evidence is second hand and is from many years (30+) after the event. This is verifiably false. The burial story within Mark in particular has been argued to the point of academic consensus to come from within a few years of the event. The accounts of the Gospels do not start to diverge until after the burial story; which means that the historian is justified in inferring that these accounts describe the original events. For further evidence feel free to read the full argument made by Dr. Craig; it can be found all over the place.

The major problem with McCormick’s argument, in my opinion is that it hinges on one point. If one compares Salem and the Resurrection both hinge on a belief. In the case of Salem it is in witchcraft and in the second the rising messiah. Now in Craig’s argument on the subject it is established that the Resurrection is not something that the early Christians would have either crafted or been predisposed to believing in (please read the argument for the proofs of these two events). In the case of Salem, the people had every reason to suspect witchcraft. McCormick again and again states that we have all this historical evidence of witchcraft surely the standard of evidence is in favor of that? This is silly since it annihilates his argument. Craig’s argument requires that there be no reason why the early Christians would believe that the resurrection would occur. Based on that it is reasonable to infer that they did not make it up. Gert Lüdemann has already conceded this point. In the case of Salem, the people clearly were predisposed to believing in witchcraft and therefore had a confirmation bias.



Your argument goes wrong in many places. I will only deal with the argument that relating to the claim that there is NO record of the Romans requiring people to travel to the ancestral homeland. Raymond Brown has argued that this cannot be ruled out in the case of Israel and the line of David. You are making an statement based on a situation in which there is a large degree of historical divergence and assuming your blanket statement to be true.

The census really does not have all that much baring on the matter of Christianity. One cannot disprove the existence of the Christian God by disproving biblical literalism. Biblical literalism exists as part of the doctrine of divine inspiration and it is by no means a core aspect of belief. Why this "all or nothing" attitude? Why would such relatively minor qualms as yours about the reliability of the Gospel accounts call into question Jesus' deity and resurrection or the existence of God? The same is true of your argument relating to Israel.



So now were discussing the exodus, the plagues and the foundation of Israel, the cyclops, cercie and Poseidon widening the scope much? The plagues have no real bearing on this subject; I am not sure why you bought them up. Here is a good article on Israel and the Exodus:
Exodus and the foundation of Israel. Schiffman, Lawrence H. ‘Has the Exodus Really Been Disproven?’ (Professor of Judaic Studies NYU) http://www.dovidgottlieb.com/comments/Exodus.htm



Based on that you have no grounds for believing anything written before the renaissance. Your posted is predicated on a terrible definition of what counts as historical evidence. There is no reason what-so-ever to expect ancient history to conform to the standards set by modern history. To insist upon this is just silly.

I said I hadn't heard good things about him. I don't know all of the details.

Maybe I was hasty, but I think my point was really more about evidence tending to be empirical in nature, rather than abstract like philosophical argumentation tends to be. Philosophical argumentation tends to be an interpretation of data. Evidence tends to be the data itself. At least, that's just a quick glance on that issue. I am not going to commit heavily to this position though.

Both are difficult to prove, but despite that, I am unsure whether the idea of a Reformed Epistemology really solves our problems. I think that minds are also more universally an intuition than gods.


I know that the argument is based upon four supposed facts.


Well, actually, I think that the consensus has generally argued that the accounts in the Gospels are second hand and from many years after the event. It is commonly found in the literature on the topic that Mark, which is considered the earliest Gospel, to be dated between 65 and 75 AD. Even further, the Gospel of Mark has a number of geographic errors, and implicit beliefs that were not Jewish. As such, most scholars would hold Mark to be later. Even further, the accounts of the Gospels are all borrowed from one another, an issue that is well-recognized in the literature. They don't count as independent accounts, but rather, when one appeals to the Gospels, one is basically appealing to one account.


Well, the problem is that resurrection was not something that was outright rejected by that culture, despite the many evangelical claims against that. For instance, according to Matthew and Mark, Herod at first believed that Jesus was John the Baptist arisen from the grave:
Mar 6:14 King Herod heard of it, for Jesus' name had become known. Some said, "John the Baptist has been raised from the dead. That is why these miraculous powers are at work in him."

Mat 14:2 and he said to his servants, "This is John the Baptist. He has been raised from the dead; that is why these miraculous powers are at work in him."

This means that a belief in resurrections pre-existed the resurrection of Jesus according to Christian scriptures. This also allows for a resurrection to be perceived as a possibility by early Christians. Even further, as pointed out by Leon Festinger's work on cognitive dissonance, making up excuses is common for failed cults, and Christ's ministry would certainly count for that.

Now, I am really not concerned with what Gerd Ludemann does or does not do, as he does not represent everyone, or even everyone within the Jesus Seminar.

As for "confirmation bias", the basic point by McCormick is that the evidence is better, and given that we have more and more recent reports, that counts as better evidence. In both cases, we have a lot of reason to suspect strong cognitive failings.


Part of the issue is that if the Gospel authors are willing to make things up for the sake of their story, then this undermines the reliability of their account. Given that there are a number of cases of errors, and even invention in the text, we have a good reason to distrust these claims, particularly given that they make an implausible claim of a resurrection of a person from the dead. If a source is already unreliable, then how can we trust it for the extreme claim of a resurrection? As it stands, we have countless false miracle claims, and so given the inductive presumption against miracles in the Gospel based upon our background knowledge, we should require a high quality of evidence. The issue is that there is reason to doubt that we have this in the Gospels.


Well, it isn't implausible to believe that. I mean, the real proof that Caesar crossed the Rubicon is really the coinage and correspondence of other historical changes, not any single written work.