WE have a human craving for certainty. It’s what encourages some people to become uber-atheists exhibiting a religious sort of zeal.
They can’t be certain that God exists and therefore conclude He definitely doesn’t.
Seeing is believing but it works the other way too. Believing is seeing. Knowing God is simply the progressive realisation of the presence within us.
Professor Sir John Polkinghorne, one of the world’s most renowned particle physicists, insisted that there was no lack of evidence of God. “I believe God reveals his nature in many ways,” he said.
“They’re not demonstrations that knock you down, but they are very striking things about the world that are best understood as the work of God.”
Stuart Burgess, a spacecraft specialist who designed solar panels for US satellites, said “the most moving evidence for Christianity I have seen is when a person with a broken life puts their trust in the Lord Jesus and finds healing, peace and purpose.”
It’s lives radically changed by an awareness of God that will always be the greatest evidence and sign of a loving creator.
When lives are genuinely redeemed there’s no need for faith to degenerate into a kind of meaningless religious performance, duty, obligation or ritual.
Bryan Patterson's Faithworks 
Now there’s a coincidence! (oops…sorry!)
I was going ‘off-topic’ to post this yarn about the effects of ‘love’ which Mon sent me some time ago but has just now turned up on my system. (perhaps god working in his mysterious way held it over for ‘moderation’??
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534246/The-mutt-taught-meaning-life-Burnt-Life-lost-purpose-Lorraine-felt-way-met-dog-desperate-love-Their-story-enchant-you.html
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“They (so called uber atheists) can’t be certain that God exists and therefore conclude He definitely doesn’t” – it’s very easy to set up a caricature of a type of atheist and knock it down strawman style. Most atheists, including some very famous ones, don’t talk about certainty at all: they refer to probability. The confirmation bias assertions (as quoted) of Polkinghorne are statements of personal feeling, not evidence.
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Geneticist Francis Collins revealed that atheist Richard Dawkins admitted to him during a conversation that the most troubling argument for nonbelievers to counter is the fine-tuning of the universe.
“If they (constants in the universe) were set at a value that was just a tiny bit different, one part in a billion, the whole thing wouldn’t work anymore,” said Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, during the 31st Annual Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.
These constants regarding the behaviour of matter and energy – such as strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, and the speed of light – have to be precisely right during the Big Bang for life as we know it to exist.
“To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability,” said the world renowned scientist.
“That forces a conclusion. If you are an atheist, either it is just a lucky break and the odds are so remote, or you have to go to this multiverse hypothesis, which says that there must be almost an infinite number of parallel universes that have different values of those constants.
“And of course we are here and so we must have won the lottery, we must be in the one where everything worked.”
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Nothing attributed to Collins, or what Dawkins said to him counts as evidence for a creator god, nor does it provide an example of an “uber-athiest” as discussed here.
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And you can’t provide evidence to prove Collins isn’t right. As someone said: “For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.”
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Then Jesus told him (Doubting Thomas), “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
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“And you can’t provide evidence to prove Collins isn’t right.” I wasn’t making any claims about whether Collins was right or not.
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No, but your “evidence” is no more valid than Collins’
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Using Collin’s words as applied to my late Nana’s roast chicken:
“If the ingredients Nana Joan’s roast chicken dinner were just a tiny bit different, one part in whatever, the whole meal wouldn’t taste the same,” said Stu, the grandson of Joan at a family BBQ in Canberra.
The constants regarding oven temperature – such as use of a fan forced oven, a heavy based pot, and the correct cooking time and use of herbs, have to be precisely right for chook dinner as we know it to exist.
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Yeah but you Nanna _God bless her _ didn’t create the world…talk about strawmen!!!
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“No, but your “evidence” is no more valid than Collins’” Neither Collins nor I were asserting evidence for anything.
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“Yeah but you Nanna _God bless her _ didn’t create the world…” I’m not so sure. You may not either if you’d tasted that chook…
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There are strawmen and uberstrawmen:_
“Yeah but you Nanna _God bless her _ didn’t create the world…talk about strawmen!!! ”
….and god – nanna bless him – can’t roast chicken.
So your point is????? 🙂
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That —> (” For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.” )is as glib as it is false. (Do you understand the rule of ‘strict liability’?)
I don’t believe, but I’m willing to accept proof.
Got any? 😆
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Before one can legitimately make an assertion on that basis:-
“its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life form,”
….one has to define WHAT a “life form” IS.
eg. How do we know that what WE call ‘rock’ (on Mars, say) isn’t actually a “life form” differently ‘fine-tuned’?
Point being that any OTHER setting in the ‘fine-tuning’ might just as easily have produced ‘a’ life-form ~ even if it was one WE wouldn’t recognise as such.
ie. What variation in ‘fine-tuning’ makes an elephant a ‘life-form’ as compared to a virus??
…….or a diamond.
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Dabs the best response to the fine tuning = god thesis IMHO is from Douglas Adams:
“Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, may have been made to have me in it!”
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Yep: that’s a good one Stu ~puddles and holes.
Perhaps a bit esoteric for some here though? 🙂
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Before the big bang, what was water ?
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Who knows…. “Before the big bang, what was water ?”
Our knowledge of how things work would suggest some form of energy from a previous Big Bang.
More interesting ~ and given the nominally~ infinite compression-rate within Black Holes: Before the Big Bang, what was god? (Your’s, Our’s or Their’s)
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Red Herrings galore!….and pretty stupid ones at that! (Goldfish perhaps?)
Who the hell SEZ “(so called uber atheists) CAN’T be certain that God exists”
….and what level of evidence does he provide to support THAT generalisation?
……oh…I see: NONE!
Pretty typical in the Land of Godfreaks:- Make an outrageously stupid assertion, accept it as ‘true’ and commence building fantasies upon it.
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More fallaciously assertive twaddle! —> “the most troubling argument for nonbelievers to counter is the fine-tuning of the universe.”
Where’s the proof ~ or even minimal evidence ~ that the universe is ‘fine-tuned’?
….oh! I see. NONE!
It’s not. It’s evolved ~ and evolution has (JUST FOR THIS TINY MOMENT) brought the existence of things to the point some claim was deliberately pre-planned to be so, in ‘fine-tuned’ detail, a mere 6000 years ago.
(aside:- if that were true then the drooling idiot who did the alleged fine-tuning needs electro-therapy!…..in high voltages!”
There’s no ‘fine-tuning’; that’s just a word we use to congratulate ourselves for our own egotistical existence….which, in the big scheme, doesn’t even register as a blip on the radar.
It’s a definition of Infinity that anything that can happen will happen: and so here we are.
And just as evolution brought us into being because the circumstances were right, so will evolution push us into non-being when the circumstances cease to be right.
And the cockroaches, which were here for millions of years before the dinosaurs, will be here millions of years after homosaps has been dropped by evolution. Do any of you known whether they talk shyte about the ‘fine-tuning’ of the universe or which hand god wants them to use when wiping their bums?
I suspect the longevity of the cockroach is due (in relative terms) to them not being nearly as big-headed as our species of bug.
Come to think of it, a ‘finely-tuned’ universe would NOT have fine-tuned mankind into existence a couple of million years before it fine-tuned the existence of dunny-paper. Nor, particularly, womankind, since women use 3.6 times more dunny-paper than mankind does. 😉
ps………“If they (constants in the universe) were set at a value that was just a tiny bit different, one part in a billion, the whole thing wouldn’t work anymore,”
OF COURSE it would!! What a fallaciously misleading bit of bullshit that is. Where matter/energy exists ‘work’ done. De-tuning all creation doesn’t just miraculously turn everything into public-servants! (or other paper-pushers)
Since it cannot UNexist, It would merely “work” in a different way with parameters and consequences we (probably) wouldn’t
understand (given our understanding of the way it works within the current parameters).
This absurd argument is in the same league as daylight-saving fading the curtains ~ or the ferociously heated debate about
the armageddon threatened by moving dunnies INTO the house!
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Most atheists, Stu? Most that you know, more likely. Some that I know are quite dogmatically anti-theist. Of course that is the vocal ones. I guess there are many more who say nought, so you could be right!
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There is a distinction between ‘anti-theist’ and ‘non-theist’ though Strewth.
I’m not sure ‘anti-theists’ can be atheist, since the recognition of a god to which one can be ‘anti’ anounts to acceptance but disagreement.
eg. A moslem would be ‘anti-theist’ in terms of a christian god.
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But Dabbles, they still call themselves atheists!
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Strewth – yes, I’m happy to qualify what I said with “most that I know”. It would also include those atheists that frequent blogs like this, ABC Religion and Ethics and the Atheist Foundation of Australia’s forums. It would also include most of the famous and recognised atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens. To be anti-god(s) or not believe in them are not the same thing.
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I’ve used the wrong word again! I have to watch my words with you super-bright people. Anti-theists of course would be those anti God, and therefore more akin to Satan who does believe in Him!
I should have probably said ‘God deniers’?
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IStrewth – If by “god-denier” you mean “asserting that god(s) doesn’t/don’t exist” – I’m not one of them and neither is Richard Dawkins (as an example). As for “super bright”, not so sure! But I’ll take a complement where I can get one. 😉
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Excellent point!
The need for certainty also leads many believers into fundamentalism.
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The God in whom we live and move and have our being, is this the Universe? The Expression of God, the Logos, which was since time began – is this the creation of the Universe? The whole thing omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.
It doesn’t matter. If such a God speaks to us personally through parts of ‘It’s self, like angels, it is God speaking. Just as our own words come through parts of our body. It doesn’t matter, because we don’/t need to know. All we need to know we are loved, and can learn to love. It is more natural to love than to hate, I recently heard quoted, but I don’t know where from!
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Just wondered about us being made in the image of the universe, with all those atoms of us having electrons whizzing around a nucleus!
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lol: WE have a human craving for certainty.
You’ve never seen herd of li’l ol’ ladies at the pokies, have you lad?
The fact is our species ~ along with every other (excepting ones like ants) thrives upon uncertainty! We can’t live without it…..NOR WANT TO.
Boredom kills more people than probably any other cause.
It’s accurately said that ‘old age’ prepares us for death.
….and it does so by gradually removing all the uncertainties that previously kept us motivated.
What got our primate ancestors out of the tree-tops was the uncertainty ~ the life-giving challenge ~ of leaving the certainty of the trees and risking the unknown.
And the same motivation applies to the godbotherers of all brands. If they were certain of what they preached why aren’t they walking off cliffs in droves to get to heaven asap?
…..or is it only the certainty of the sudden stop at the bottom that keeps you out of heaven?
While they’re alive the certainty that god doesn’t exist can be disputed. A mangled heap at the bottom of the cliff discovers with absolute certainty whether ‘it’s all true’ or all UNtrue.
But none of you really want to discover the absolute certainty, do you?
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I know I’m ancient, Dabbles, but there are many areas where I have uncertainty. For example, I am uncertain about Jeremy Rifkin’s “The Zero Marginal Cost Society” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-iDUcETjvo
It runs for just under an hour, but is well worth watching. I skipped the intro.
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Haven’t had a chance to kick back and watch the clip, Strewth, but keep in mind that your very ancient-ness might be due to your uncertainty.
I really think you’d get a lot of food-for-thought from reading Ardrey ~ particularly ‘African Genesis’. (I’ve got a copy on disc I can run up for you if you like.)
There’s a couple of paragraphs that address this very question most succinctly. (Might post them later ~ universally applicable.)
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According to scripture, Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love for someone may not inlcude even liking them,!
When it doesn’t seem possible, bitterness can set in.
Bitterness follows unwanted experiences—failures, disappointment, setbacks—that are perceived to be beyond one’s control. It can occur when one believes, rightly or wrongly, that other people could have prevented the undesired outcome. Regret involves blaming oneself. .But, much like other negative emotions, it could forecast physical disease.
To regulate bitterness, individuals who failed should assess the likelihood of achieving the goal if they decide to try again. If success is unlikely, individuals should move on to other pursuits.
The embittered should try to reconcile, take some responsibility, and get over the blame game.
Older adults generally experience more disappointments that could lead to bitterness, but most can easily disengage from impractical goals and commit to other meaningful pursuits. Those who can’t curb their bitterness may be compromising their health and happiness, so If bitterness persists, consult a mental health practitioner.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/08/the-psychology-of-bitterness-10-essential-lessons/244064/#slide10
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hehehehe….
“According to scripture, Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
….sounds pretty “proud” and ‘boastful to me’. 🙂
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Do you think the writer is b oasting? He doesn’t say he’s achieved it, just recognised it.
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nah….just a quick quip. Having a shot at ‘The Scripture’. Bragging proudly about how proud it isn’t.
Reminds me of the picture I saw of Jonah standing on the beach with outstretched arms,
…..and one jew watching from the sand-dunes saying to another: ‘ I do wish Jonah would stop telling us the same old yarn about the one that got away’.
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