I thank you for being rational when speaking. Most theists that come here do fall into one of those 10 categories. I myself have no problem with accepting, or others accept the existence of god. I however, go with the scientific point of view which is simply if you make a claim for the positive(such as a god existing) the burden of proof is on them. Makes sense right? So, since no one has offered any evidence, scientifically that does not exist. It could still exist, however I pick that choice to follow.

 I guess I disagree with people in the sense I don't know why they don't pick the same choice, no proof means it does not exist until you can prove it does. It's their choice though, thats fine. 

I can be convinced of a god, when it presents itself, or is proven however. I have no problem with it.

However their is one thing in regards to god I hate. It's fine to believe in a god, that hurts no one. Most atheists try to argue that believing in a god hurts someone. I'm not arguing that. Believing there is a creator is fine, it hurts no one it does not force you to do anything, does not force morality on anyone, it hurts nothing. When you however try to link that god with a certain religion thats when we have the problem. Thats when god suddenly goes from harmless to harmful. Also having all religions against eachother fighting whos religion is the real religion is not good either. Putting a religion to a god when their are thousands of religions is just foolish. Thats the only problem I have with god, not god itself but the god portrayed by the corsponding religion.

When people use the bible to somehow try to change us they should already know that does not work. We don't believe in the bible, however being edjucated on the subject is also good instead of dismising it. I study the bible a lot myself. When I quote a passage, being a contridiction, to something immoral, to something proven wrong. It's not to prove to them the bible is false, or that they should change. It's to make them think, is the bible that trustworthy when it contridictes itself, many aspects proven false(thats if you trust the evidence given by science that is) and the immoral things as well.

Agnostic means you can never know.

Gnostic means you refuse to believe otherwise.

These two terms are uaually supplied as single meanings to a person, but does not answer the question atheist or theist.  

I myself do not wish anyone to be theist or athiest if it forces them to be gnostic in the subject. If your going to be a theist, be a agnostic theist so you can question and make the right choice in regards to your god. Same goes with atheists, being gnostic is being ignorant. Being agnostic in regards is basically saying your skeptical towards your belief.

Skeptical is good, you can rationalize why you believe. For me, no proof means I do not believe in it. Simple enough right?

Have a nice day and welcome to the RRS forums Chamathman. I suggest you go to general discussion and introduce yourself, you should of did it before but it's nice to introduce yourself to the comunity. Keeps people from calling you a troll.

Please cite one scientific test, or even a testable hypothesis for this creationism "model".

Evolution is absolutely a scientific theory. How can a schoolteacher not know this? As for your question about labeling them "models" here is my problem with that: You're putting them on even ground. While evolution is not yet 100% airtight, the pile of evidence we have to back it would be the size of K2 in comparison to the amount of evidence we have to support creationism. Also, since Darwin first posed the theory of evolution, we have found numerous pieces of evidence since then to support evolution, while not one piece of information has been found that made serious scientists say "wait, we might have this evolution thing all wrong." On the flip side, with each passing day we learn more reasons to think creationism is a complete crock, and have never found any evidence in its favor. None. As I stand on my soapbox, I can hear deludedgod's music come over on the loud speaker. If anything I said here is false, he'll mop up quite nicely.

Again, how can a schoolteacher be so complete clueless as to what evolution is? There is nothing unreasonable about the fact that organisms that 'obtain' advantageous mutations are more likely to thrive, and therefore pass the beneficial mutation on to their offspring. Nothing about this process requires any presence of an intelligence to push it along.

This is simply incorrect. You're not out in left field here, you're on Pluto.

We have at least one biologist on these boards if not more, and there are numerous backed-with-evidence threads on this subject here as well. If you plan on contradicting all of these, you're going to have to do better than the argument from assertion.

What other kinds of evidence are there?

No, we've asked christians to prove there are 100 rocks in that pile, by showing us the pile and counting the rocks.

This is another fallacy. Of course scientists use intuition, et al. The difference between theists and scientists is that intuition and inference are not enough for scientists. They must have evidence to back their intuition, or the idea is scrapped or altered as necessary. Many of you theists haven't changed your tune in 2000 years. Quite frankly, any theist that believes in Adam and Eve is a complete and total moron with ignorance in spades.

Yes, exactly. What's your point? No branch of science adheres to a hypothesis without having it pass numerous tests based on physical evidence.

Why? (And who is this addressed to?)

Yes, there are very few original thoughts on the matter out there. If you look around these forums for a while, you will find almost every even remotely reasonable argument on either side that you could think of. Mostly, discussing the arguments serves to inform those who are unaware or misinformed.

No, although you are correct that evolution is not a law and creationism is neither theory nor law. Creationism is untestable, and therefore is not science. Your usage of the term 'model' is not the proper scientific usage. Scientific modelling is something else entirely (read the link if you care to know more).

Far from being on the far fringe of science, this is a nearly direct quote of a comment made by Richard Dawkins, a prominent, respected, and very mainstream evolutionary biologist. He furthermore clarified that evolution is (paraphrasing) 'the non-random selection of randomly arising traits'. Far from contradicting original Darwinism, this is the only reasonable way to construe Darwinism. If Darwin had described a purely random process, it would have been dismissed as useless nonsense long ago.

In fact, revolutionary idea was the identification of the purposeless nonrandom mechanism by which complexity can arise, natural selection. Previously, it was taken for granted that nonrandom processes had to be driven by purpose, hence the watchmaker argument for the existence of god. Darwin removed that misconception, and for that he has been vilified by theists who, for good reasons, see it as a serious threat.

That's just a misconception on your part. The diversity occurs naturally by mutation, but the selection is what causes change, and the selection is nonrandom.

Darwinism has never, ever held that natural selection is a random process. That's your misconception. And the environmental changes that occur do so by a variety of natural processes, none of which are really random.

Imagine, for instance, that the climate changes, and suddenly the food source that a species used became less available. Then natural selection might favor traits which allow a different food to be eaten.

That's not very nice. We could just as easily say that you're trying to mislead people because of your misrepresentation of Darwinism, but I would rather assume that you just aren't that familiar with Darwinism.

No, none that I'm aware of. Could you please cite a peer-reviewed article in a major scientific publication casting doubt on the theory of evolution?

The scientific debate that occurs over evolution is in the details of how it occurred, not the fundamental question of if it occurred. Furthermore, it is fundamental to many branches of science, such as biology, geology, psychology, sociology, and probably some others that I'm not aware of.

Once again, this isn't very nice.

I'm not sure what you are referring to here. Abiogenesis is a hypothesis, and so its truth is not taken for granted by scientists. It is one possible way that life could have gotten started. We are waiting for evidence.

Pointing out the errors in a scripture does not require believing in that scripture. That's what I use the Bible for, and it seems perfectly reasonable. However, if you wish to be a type of theist that does not believe in the Bible as the word of god, I will discuss theism with you on different terms. So, the real question is 'what do you think the Bible is?'

So, you don't see the god of the Bible as having ordered genocide? Because the Bible is pretty explicit about it. Do you deny that the Bible is authoritative.

Intuition, inference, and reason are useful tools, but they do not constitute proof. Sure, I use all these things all the time, but I don't expect anyone to believe things without evidence.

Many reasonably deduced hypotheses have been proven wrong. Reason is not a formal process that produces unquestionable truth (like logic does).

As an example, many scientists once believed that our ancestors evolved large brains first, and then stood upright later so that their hands were free for the things their large brains could think to do. It was reasonable, but it turned out not to be true. Now, it's almost universally accepted that our ancestors stood upright, and the large brain developed later. The later hypothesis was supported when the first hominid fossils were discovered, but the former was not unreasonable, just wrong.

I do wonder who this was intended for. Sapient, perhaps?

Look at it. The first post tries to cover as many topics as possible. With a little thought, the real reason we get so many hit-and-runners becomes apparent: they expect that one post is all they need! They have no idea that we've heard it all before. They assume that their one post will be the one magic bullet that drives into the heart of our atheism and blows it apart like an armor-penetrating round. The drive-by metaphor is apt: they just assume their target is dead and then bolt. Some of the drive-byers just "spray and pray": they discuss everything from evolution and Biblical criticism to epistemology and the scientific method in the hopes that something will stick. Some of the others go for the sniper round, with a short concise point intending to quote the Bible to point out our folly or to undermine science and Biblical scholarship. But the pathology is the same: they all assume that one post will be enough. And it never is.

Bod posted more than once.

Just when I thought we had a reasonable theist....at least Bod would act like he was answering you.

After looking over much of your material and previous discussions, however, I’ve realized you aren’t that person I was hoping for. I can pretty much predict your responses to anything I would say based on what I’ve seen so far, so I’m not going to bother arguing God’s existence with you.

I believe that in the business we call this an ad hominem. If you are so confident surely you should be taking the opposite approach. This is precisely the kind of behaivour that you were apologizing for in your above statements.

I would like, instead, to address some problems I see with your approach and argumentation. I will then bid you a respectful adieu (unless you send me a particularly compelling response).

I'll be suprised if you respond to anything posted but nonetheless I admit this is an effective way to avoid an argument because you don't want to get into it. Well done.

First of all, I would like to HIGHLY commend you for being calm and respectful in the face of the frequent ignorance, hatefulness, and profane anger you’ve faced. I wish you were exposed to more people on my side of the discussion that had your demeanor and approach.

Such people tend not to visit the site. What does annoy me is that this site is crawling with radicals and fundamentalists. Only a few moderates.

First of all, let’s agree to be honest about something. Evolution is not a law. Creationism is not a law. Evolution is not a theory. Creationism is not a theory. Because of the nature of what they attempt to explain, they should both be categorized as models, explanations of phenomena either too complex, too far past, or yet future to be observable. Wouldn’t you agree?

This is a typical ignorance of the scientific method. A law is axiomatic in mathematics. A theory is an explanation based on evidence and hypothesis. Creationism (I trust you mean Genesis creationism) has no evidence. Evolution does. Furthermore, evolution is very observable, the fact that you don't know about it is not really our problem. You postulate them as though they were on equal footing. Creationism cannot be categorized as a model because even a model requires evidence. If you allow creationism to be a model, you also have to allow scientology creationism, Hindu creationi, Islam creation and any other of the plethora of mythology mankind has created. You surely cannot have such ridiculously low standards of proof as "none at all".

Neo-Darwinism leaves room for random (by definition, ‘random’) mutations that simply give some advantage to an organism. I’d love for you to explain "non-random natural selection’ because it could easily look like a subtle recognition that a directed process is more reasonable to you than the long-accepted random ones, and you would be hard-pressed to convince anyone that direction doesn’t involve the presence of intelligence. I guess you could have been intentionally trying to mislead someone that you thought didn’t know better, but I doubt that based on what I’ve seen from you so far.

Nonsenical confusion. "Directed" implies a guiding hand. All mutation is random. But confusing evolution and mutation is ridiculous. The environment guides evolutionary mutation because (you even mentioned this yourself, ergo defeating your own argument) the environment will decide the determinate of what an advantegeous mutation is.

There is also, as you know, much disagreement and skepticism of the evolutionary model among ALL the scientific community, not just the I.C.R. types.

You must not follow scientific journals very much. The disagreement is within mechanisms and events of evolution , for instance. The theory as a whole (ie the metaphysical philosophy of evolution and common descent) is overwhelmingly accepted.

That is, in fact, far from the truth. I also think you throw out abiogenesis a little flippantly as well, implying that it is a stronger principle than even it claims to be.

Every single person on the forum knows that abiogenesis is a hypothesis. I challenge you to find me an example of someone who has stated otherwise.

Second, you shouldn’t use the Bible or your preconceived understandings of God because, quite frankly, you do it very poorly. If you discount the Bible as objective statements about a God that you don’t believe exists, and don’t want Biblical arguments in support of God, then it’s not logical to use them against God, either.

I don't. The God presented by the Bible is an illogical contradiction of two impossible ontologies. This is why I do not take it seriously. Just like I do not take seriously the Qur'an or the Mormon D&C.

But the real issue here is your epistemology. You have made the rules of the challenge unwinnable. You have a very closed-minded epistemology that crosses categories with the questions you’ve asked. In other words, you’ve laid out a challenge to define and give evidence for a supernatural, all-encompassing God, but you accept only direct, limited, physical, empirical "evidence"

Obviously. verification of the supernatural is an inherent contradiction. "Supernatural" in and of itself does not mean anything. Evidence, by definition is natural. If something has empirical veracity, then it is not supernatural. So obviously we have rejected it. This seems to me an argumentum and ignorantium.

By analogy, you’ve asked Christians to count to 100, but declared that you will accept only even numbers for answers. You are not open to many sources of truth that everyone, including scientists, use every day: intuition, inference, and reason.

What? Let me spell it out for you.

A supernatural being cannot be verified to exist

If it could, it would be natural

Therefore, we reject God on grounds that it cannot be verified.

And if you are so confident, I trust you can provide your arguments for God. I have been hopeful but rather underwhelmed before. Let us see your arguments.

Yes, I said reason. In spite of the name of your group, you do not accept reasonably deduced hypothesis from existing empirical phenomena. You want only touchable, measurable, physical evidence. There is no branch of science that works without these methods, ESPECIALLY evolutionary science.

I trust by this that you mean the design argument. No modern theologian would accept the ontological arguments, and certainly not the first cause argument. The design argument is factually incorrect because God is not necessary to explain life.

Furthermore, from a scientific epistemological standpoint, typically the inference is made on physical evidence, not a posteriori or a priori. for instance, from this:

http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/sapient/atheist_vs_theist/5465

We can infer common descent. 

Let me leave you with a rule that no theist I have hitherto encounted understands:

An Ontology for X only establishes that X is. It cannot establish that X=Y or that X=Z and definitely not that Y=Z

Oops, it appears I accidentally resubmitted the same post.

I'm new here, but this statement in particular really grabbed my attention.  Is science viewed as superior to religion because it is sometimes oracular?  Honest Christianity (I'm sorry, Christianity is the only religion I'm very familiar with) is not in the business of telling the future.  There are many who claim it is, or it should be, but those are not honest claims.  Yes, the Bible contains many recordings of prophesies relating to future events ("future" at the time of the prophesy), but there is no claim that faith or God are reliable oracles.

The OP's criticisms were fairly harsh.  I'm hoping the truth of the interest in honest debate here isn't as dim as he claimed.

When a theory predicts something, that doesn't necessarily mean it's predicting future events. (Sometimes it is, as in meteorology.) The predictions are can be consequences of the theory.

For instance, Einstein's famous equation E=mc^2 "predicts" that there's a lot of energy stored up in atoms. This led to nuclear reactors and weapons. But E=mc^2 didn't predict that, "One day there will be nuclear explosions in Japan that lead to the end of WWII."

A fair point.  Oracular would be the wrong word, then.  Divinating might be better.  Revealing things you aren't currently able to perceive.  That would include the future, but not be limited to it.  The point remains with the revised wording - neither faith nor God claim to grant powers of divination.  Christianity has it that God can grant insight, but prayer is not a magic spell.  God does not jump on command.

My point wasn't that Christianity is silent about the future, it was that there is no reliable way to divine information.  We have what we are given, not what we ask for.

 Yes, I believe Jesus Christ will return, and in a judgement.  I don't think I believe in your understanding of the statement "that some of us will be sent to heaven, and some to hell."  All the same, I couldn't tell you the slightest bit of useful information about it.  It's like saying that I think one day the galaxy will end.  Well, I'm willing to guess just about everyone here agrees, but I don't think we've agreed on anything particularly useful.

I've been perusing the forums lightly, and it seems a lot of malcontent about Christianity is based on the fallacy that it is a "feel-good" religion, that it makes people feel better.  What I have learned thus far is that humans have rebelled against a just and loving God, and tried to set themselves up as equally able to provide life and happiness.  If God is really just, why should I - the rebel - be comforted by this information?

You are correct that I am taking it on the authority of the Bible, and that it is not an agreed-upon authority.  I won't try to convince you otherwise, either.  In my personal experience, accepting the Bible is a long way down the road from believing in some kind of supernatural creator, let alone the Christian God.  I will use the Bible to attempt to prove internal consistency within Christian theology.

If it's all right, for the time being I will also refrain from greatly explaining the details of my beliefs concerning Christian specifics.  As with the Bible, those things are a ways down the road.  Hopefully we can get to them eventually.

This sounds extremely true to my ears.  I have met, and years ago been greatly turned off by, Christians of similar sorts.  I spent my youth as an agnostic, and I think we're in complete agreement that Christians have the same nasty habit as just about everyone - they say some incredibly stupid things sometimes.  I have a long history of it myself, and can only hope some education has dulled that habit.

This, I believe, becomes the crux of the Christian belief system, so it seems an excellent place to start.  The Christian principle is that God is three things: all-powerful, all-loving, and all-just.  We suspect his justice stems from his love because within the human experience love is the primary force of temperment in justice.  "Love" might better be phrased "charity" or "good-will" in this case.  Those words do not sum it up, rather love contains them, but it is out of that aspect of love that justice is effectively rendered.  If we had no good-will to other people we would be more likely to kill for offenses than simply offer stern words.

As for being all-powerful, that is somewhat de facto of a supernatural creator.  We can only define "power" within our personal experience, and if every power in the universe was created by - and thus less powerful than - God, by definition the creator, must be more powerful than anything else.

That leaves us with all-loving.  The primary goal of love, so far as I can tell, is to share it.  Love is a wonderful state of being, feeling, or whatever you want to call it.  Love is good.  It also assumes an empathy with others and a desire to see good things in them.  If love is good, then sharing love is good.  If God is all-loving, one could then infer that his greatest desire is to share his love.

By that train of logic, the purpose of creation is so that God has creatures to share his love with.  If we were to desire the same thing, could we simply create a statue or drawing to share love with?  Hardly.  We would need to create something like ourselves that can also think and feel and be individual.  Therefore, to share love with his creation, it is necessary that his creation can do all these things - that they can be persons.

There is an unfortunate consequence to a free creation, which is that the creation might not cooperate.  The Christian belief is that humanity decided it could do well enough on its own, and had no need of God.  This is what I mean by rebellion.  Justice, therefore, is to let humanity try it their way.  The Christian belief is that we are not capable of taking care of ourselves, evidenced by the fact that we die.  While we might go on for a while, ultimately we cannot sustain ourselves.

That is the beginning of how a Christian might see God as just despite a harsh life.  The fundamental flaw in most "feel good" Christianity is that we will get some kind of reward - eternal life - for being good.  Eternal life is not a reward, it is the intended state for people.  Nothing we can do will make us worthy of eternity because we are incapable of being completely unselfish, and therefore completely loving.

It is an extremely weighty subject, of course.  I don't want to end up writing a full thesis instead of having a conversation about it.  I'll stop here for now.  Hopefully I've at least begun to answer the question you posed about how God could be just, and at least elaborated on the rebellion I referred to.  If it wasn't sufficient, I will try to be more specific.

The information I referred to was Christian theology.  If I believe in Christian theology to feel good, I am looking in the wrong place because Christian theology will tell me is that I'm a world-class screw-up and God knows it, and no matter how hard I try it won't be enough to outweigh my faults.

First, a definition for supernatural:

Something for which there is neither ocular proof nor is measurable. For example, even though electromagnetic waves, subnuclear particles, et cetera may not be visible, yet they are measurable and their existence can be repetitively tested. However, we cannot either see or measure a ghost.

Of course, just because a thing is not directly measurable does not mean we cannot measure its influence on other measurable things.  For a long time we could not measure black holes (apart from x-rays, I think), but we could predict their presence based on their impact on the surrounding space.

On the Bible: I did not come to believe the Bible was authoritative for many years after effectively becoming a deist.  Validating the Bible is not necessary to invalidating athiesm.  I base my theology on the Bible, but not my belief in a deity.  The Bible gives structure to faith; it does not create faith on its own.  It is therefore not necessary for use in theist/athiest debate, apart from discussing specific Christian theology.

If you're going to assume I'm self-contradicting because I'm not interested in validating the Bible to you on grounds that you don't believe what it is based on, I suppose we can stop talking.  I'm hoping you're willing to entertain debate about deism in general, with the foreknowledge that I'll be approaching it from a Christian perspective.  All that means is that I will probably not bring up things like pantheism or polytheism to refute athiesm.

I can't speak for the efficiency or inefficiency of creation, as I have no basis for comparison.  I am simply relating Christian beliefs.  How should creation have been made, if it were made by an intelligent creator?

I don't follow how I'm revising some part of the Bible.  The God of the Bible is reported to say he is jealous.  He has commanded war.  He has ordered animal and plant sacrifices.  On his jealousy I can speak briefly.  The English word does not carry the same connotation as the original Hebrew.  In Hebrew, the meaning is that God bears no rival.  The word used is also only ever used to refer to God, setting its meaning apart from the prideful jealousy we associate with the word.

As to the others, I think the problem is in the assumption that God must be opposed to hardship.  I stated before that our suffering is rooted in our initial rebellion.  There is the obvious question (which you've raised) that God must have known we would behave this way, and that it is unfair of him to effectively set us up to fail.

I cannot speak for God, but I can offer an analogy in my own life that is common to folk-wisdom (and so I assume common to many people).  It took me years of fighting, arguing, and rejecting my mother, then more years of scraping by barely able to take care of myself, to ultimately appreciate what she did and how much she gave me.  I would even say I probably didn't know how to love because I was so self-centered until life had raked me across the bottom.

I'm not saying the answer is that God makes us suffer so we can learn to love.  I am saying it is a possibility that suffering is not inherently bad just because we don't like going through it.  I've run across more than one athiest who, if it were not for years of tears and unanswered prayers, would not have found the athiesm they now celebrate.  I also don't think I've met a single person alive who hasn't been bettered by hardship.

It seems fairly odd that he/she(?) is asking us to be open minded. Surely the epistemology that we use in science and in scientific philosophy is the best there can possibly be? i.e. we only claim to know what we can actually find possible to know. He/she seems to say that we rule out anything beyond physics. Not so, we simply cannot find anything beyond physics. They say:

x exists until we prove that x exists or x doesn't exist.

We say:

it is doubtful as to whether x exists until we prove that x exists or doesn't exist.

When this is put to the concept of God it is nearly impossible to prove either way.

Well actually science is about finding out things that exist and how things work, these things are things we can in fact measure! That is exactly how we've gotten this far in science! And we know a damn site more through scientific discovery than through any speculating on supernatural Gods and their divine wisdom.

There is a fatal error in your argument. I accept the part about parenting. However you assume that to be a god is a possibility(although not for yourself), i.e. that God exists. It is common for people to actually become better parents than their parents in that they want to know what their parents knew and more. The way we see it is not that we are capable of becoming Gods in any sense of the word. But that we are capable of understanding to some level the universe in all its mind-blowing spectacle! Not only this, but it does us great good to understand the universe, that is in fact the aim of humanity, God is a personification of that goal which people who are too overwhelmed have used to try and explain it instead.

It is not that death is worse than life in any sense for the world, it is simply a process in the ever-continuing existence of life, from when it started to when it ends. But for ourselves we know there is only one life, one chance to fulfil all of our goals or achieve the most desirable state of affairs. For us death is what stops us from doing that, not that it is a bad thing but simply as an end point.

Actually love can in fact be easy or even unwanted. It is purely instinct. That doesn't minimise the importance of love. When I feel love I don't think of it purely as an evolutionary instinct governed by increases in dopemine in my brain, I think I really love this person and I want to spend the rest of my life with them, usually it goes terribly wrong, but that's simply because I've had a succession of failed relationships.

To add to the mother analogy tear down, the most basic and fundamental difference between god/man and mother/child is that the child can see the mother. Can touch her, hear her, smell her, taste her. Be affected by her. Man cannot see god. Cannot hear god. Cannot touch god. Cannot smell god. Cannot taste god. Cannot even induct the possibility of gods existance on available evidence, let alone be affected by god. The only reason theism even exists today is because of it's primitive background. If all knowledge of "supernatural" beings were somehow wiped out without losing our scientific and technological knowledge, organized theism would be forever dead to the human species. There isn't enough of a gap in human understanding of reality to support the creation of a fictional super being en masse anymore. There's just barely enough to sustain previous created fictional super beings, but that's a matter of momentum. And that momentum is destabilizing.

There is something else going on in this definition of supernaturalism that was not addressed.

How do we perceive objects, even those that we cannot directly see? For everything that we can measure or perceive, there is some medium of stuff that brings the information to our consciousness. In the case of a flower, for example, the lights from some source (most likely the sun) reflects off of the surfaces of the flower, reaches my eyes, and my eyes transform the light into signals that my brain can process into a neural pattern that becomes my conscious image of a flower.

In the case of things like black holes, we can measure the gravitational effect around the event horizons on other things that we can measure, and thus indirectly detect the influence of them.

Can we do this with something supernatural? Let's revisit the definition from above;

It's not that we haven't measured it, but that it is not measurable. That is, there is no way for things in the natural universe to interact with it, right? In what other way it is inherently immeasurable? If the supernatural were to share no ontological relationship with the natural, meaning we could not measure it in any way, then it would follow that there would be no possible influence on other things to measure the supernatural, even indirectly. For if there were a way to have the supernatural effect the natural world so that we could indirectly derive it's existence, we should (in principle) be able to detect it directly using the same natural medium of effect through which we derived it's influence.  Again, whatever medium of interaction that allowed the supernatural to influence the natural for us to indirectlky derive the supernatural's existence, we shoudl be able to step in (again, in principle) and view the medium of influence between the supernatural and natural.

I think that you, JHensen, either need to be more clear about the nature (sic) of the supernatural--that is, define it's ontological status in relation to nature--or simply admit that there is no evidence, direct or indirect, for it's existence.

What do you see in the world that you think is the result of supernatural influence which could not more easily and more elegantly explained by some natural force or set of forces? Why even consider the supernatural as possibly real in the first place?

Shaun

I tried replying a few days ago, but the forums crashed or something.  At any rate, I'll reply to each post seperately to avoid losing a lot of writing again.

 Christianity agrees that understanding the universe is good, and that a fraction of this is possible.  I would contend against the statement that understanding is the "aim of humanity" on the simple grounds that I don't think even athiests would all agree on that.  Perhaps it is your personal belief?  Would you expound on how you came to believe this, or why it seems self-evident?

I presume by "desirable state of affairs" you refer to social welfare - the betterment of humankind and all that.  Could you define the former - "all of our goals."  There is a line I perceive dividing social welfare from personal goals, and the two often compete.  My expectation and current understanding is that athiesm would suggest balance as the answer.  Before getting into it though, I would like to hear "our goals" better defined.

Passion is easy, not love.  A track-record of failed relationships does not indicate you have a matured concept of love.  Truthfully, it indicates the opposite.  I mean no disrespect, and that is a matter a person should explore personally, so I won't lecture.

first i'd like to point out one thing:

theories are indeed models, they are neither more or less acceptable then laws. theories do not have 'levels of certainty' associated with them. this is a very common misconception. one could very well make 'creationism' a theory, if only there was non-biblical evidence present, but sadly there is not. but for future reference: theory(n): "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena", its the scientific equivilent of a mathematical theorum. 

 second: 

 the reason we use biblical scripture vs many christians is that they hold it's passages as pure fact. in order to show them that this is not the best route, we show the obvious logical incongruities and contradictions to discredit their source of 'facts'. too many christians will just spout off bible verses as fact without doing any research to see if its plausible at all.

 lastly:

as for the episotomology of an atheist,  we accept a variety of argumentative data, such as intuition as well as empirical evidence that is tangible. the problem is making the leap from intelligent design to saying that this 'designer' is the christian god is quite a large one.

 i, personally, am open to the idea of a deistic god, but this is merely a 'good idea' with no evidence supporting it, and i think we should not base our lives around 'what might be' and instead focus it around 'what is'.

No, it cannot, by definition.

If we could measure an effect, then the supernatural would be causal. Causality is part of naturalism, the supernatural is acausal. I made this simple, basic metaphysical point in the very post you think you're responding to... please read more carefully.

Continuing to reply to those I missed earlier this evening.  Hopefully I'll get everyone tonight.  Considering the crowd, it doesn't seem a very debate-friendly thread any longer, but we'll see where things go. 

Because a thing cannot be placed in your hand, so to speak, does not make it irrelevant, let alone unreal.  Of course, if I'm wrong surely you can prove free quarks to me.  Or superstring theory.  Hell, prove gravity.  Given the state of quantum physics, even that's up in the air.  It would seem my five senses aren't considered very reliable when it comes to perceiving the universe.

 If all knowledge of "supernatural" beings were somehow wiped out without losing our scientific and technological knowledge, organized theism would be forever dead to the human species. There isn't enough of a gap in human understanding of reality to support the creation of a fictional super being en masse anymore. There's just barely enough to sustain previous created fictional super beings, but that's a matter of momentum. And that momentum is destabilizing.