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/* Salvation rules out extra-terrestrial life? */ Unanswered questions, unsupported presuppositions, etc.
Thank you very much for reading my responses. --[[User:Stirlatez|Stirlatez]] 19:49, 26 August 2008 (EDT)
:"''I do not think that we necessarily need a God to decide what is "wicked."''": Yet you offered no alternative definition. Your comment about what I might do if I lost my faith has nothing to do with how wickedness is ''defined'', which is what I asked. So you haven't answered the question.
:"''Besides, gods have not always been ethical.''": I'm sure that neither you nor I believe that these "gods", other than the God of the Bible, exist, so let's leave them out of it, okay?
:"''...the fact that our modern interpretation of God is now so "moral" is a reflection of the overall progression of our ethics as a species.''": Is it? I don't believe so. You seem to be arguing from the presumption that God is something that man invented. I don't believe that. So in order for your argument to carry any weight, I have to accept something that I don't believe and which you are not arguing! See [[user:Philip J. Rayment/How to debate]].
:"''..."free will" ...is '''inherent''' in atheism!''": Yet you fail to explain how. And you are contradicted by others, such as William Provine:
{{QuoteBox|Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear … There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.[http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/4156/]}}
:"''I personally have no problem with accepting that neurochemistry exists.''": Neither do I. I was talking about whether that's ''all'' there is.
:"''Evolution is NOT random, it operates on a fixed rule which is ALWAYS predictable: Organisms well-suited for their environment will survive, the others will not. It's not a random selection at all.''": Natural selection is not random, but the mutations—the claimed source of the novel features—that it supposedly acts on are.
:"''"What do we need to be saved from?" Ourselves! Collectivism! Totalitarianism! War! It should be obvious to believers and nonbelievers that the world is a sick, sad place.''": Define "sick" and "sad". I asked you to answer without invoking God or subjective opinion, but it appears to be subjective opinion that the things that you mention are things that are somehow bad. What defines them as being bad? Perhaps my question was not clear enough, but you didn't answer it.
:"''...the four [gospels] we have now were chosen hundreds of years after Christ over dozens of others made during His time''": No, that's an atheistic fallacy. The four gospels were accepted as such basically from when they were written. This fact was not ''formalised'' until a few centuries later, but it was always accepted. Most other claimants were not written during his lifetime, and in any case were never accepted as such.
:"''Working backwards mathematically everything seems to converge on a point in time 14 billion years ago. You call it an "atheistic myth," but I call it math.''": It was not the timescale that I was questioning (although that could be questioned), so much as the ''cause''. Working backwards to a time when the universe would have been a point does not say, for example, where that point came from nor what caused it to expand. That is, there is more than one possible explanation of the outward expansion. Don't confuse the ''explanation'' with the ''evidence''.
:"''But despite what he says or what anyone else says for that matter, I do not see--except for the purpose of framing a response to Occam's Razor--how anyone anywhere can even think that God could be "simple" if they also think of Him as having a personal quality, being infinite, omniscient, etc.''": So I'm supposed to accept your argument that is based on nothing more than your lack of imagination?
:"''Intelligent design advocates hollering at me about finding a watch in the forest must admit that a watchmaker is usually more complicated than a watch.''": Although a watchmaker ''is usually'' more complicated than the watch, that is not their argument. Their argument is not that the cause of complexity is greater complexity, but that the cause of complexity is an ''intelligent being''. It is you, not the ID people, who is arguing that the intelligent designer must be more complex.
:"''You're right! Why is that ["meaning" being relative] a problem?''": I was talking here about why things are the way they are; their ''purpose''. Meaning is based on the origin of something. What, for example, is the ''purpose'' of clothes? Why do we wear clothes (even in the warmest environments)? I would argue that it's because of the Fall. Meaning has to do with the ''intended purpose''. With atheism, there is no ''intention'', hence no purpose and no meaning, because it's all the result of an accident.
:"''Also, I am really, really glad that meteorologists decided not to even consider that "Zeus did it".''": So am I, but my question, which you didn't answer, is ''why'' they don't consider that.
:"'' You say naturalism isn't useful for looking at the past,...''": No, I did not. I said that it can't always explain the ''origins'' of things.
:"''...naturalism is used all the time in retracing the steps of an automobile accident, say, or a murder''": Natural explanations can be made of the working of a car, but those explanations say nothing about the ''origins'' of the car, which is not naturalistic.
:"''By the way, yes I indeed have an employer ...''": But nothing in that paragraph actually responded to my rebuttal of your argument!
[[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 03:00, 28 August 2008 (EDT)
