The Church of The Painful Truth wrote:

[snip] The 2nd law of Thermodynamics states that matter if left to itself

deteriorates.

The second law of thermodynamics does NOT say that. Only if the system
in question is thermodynamically "closed" or "isolated" would that be
true. Perhaps that's what you mean by "left to itself". Either way, the
Earth and life on Earth does NOT constitute a thermodynamically closed
system.

"The Church of The Painful Truth" <Nospam@Nomarketing.com> wrote in

Recognize this:
When I was a faithful atheist, one of the tip-offs that

alerted me that atheism was fundamentally dishonest was the fact
that atheists so persistently misrepresented what it is the theory
actually teaches. The distortions and deceptions were too common, and
too trivially (and frequently) refuted, to suppose that the
atheists had simply misunderstood what many scientists and

were attempting

to say. Perhaps it might be argued that the atheists were actively
deceiving themselves as much as they were deceiving others, but even
so that still leaves atheism with an underlying hostility towards
the facts that was too great to allow me to continue to regard it as
deserving the label "honest."

You must have been very impressed by my post, to flatter it with such
imitation. And look what you accomplished! By doing a simple
substitution of a few words, you took a story that was an authentic,
autobiographical account that accurately represented what I observed,
and turned it into a tale that superficially resembles a reasonable
portrayal of the facts, but that is full of such inconsistencies and
inaccuracies that it's almost funny, at least in the places where it
still makes sense. You tried to put the shoe on the other foot, and
in so doing you revealed just how bad a fit it really is.

Atheists misrepresenting what the theory of evolution actually
teaches? You can't seriously have meant that, that would imply that
evolution was on the "good guy" side and was being unfairly treated by
atheists. No, you must have meant that atheists misrepresent what the
creationist theory teaches. Now tell me, if that's really your claim,
what is the difference between what creationism really teaches, and
what atheists say it teaches? (Or did you mean the word "theory" to
apply to the Gospel? Surely not, that would reduce the Gospel to
being man's best guess, not some divine revelation.)

Consider: you took scientific remarks about accumulated changes over
geological time scales, in which the term "sudden" means millions to
tens of millions of generations, and said in the title of this thread
that such changes were logically equivalent to similar changes over
the course of a single, explosive chemical reaction in which the term
"sudden" means milliseconds down to nanoseconds. Surely you can see
how inaccurate and inappropriate it is to suggest that changes
produced by accumulation of small variations over multiple millions of
refined iterations are logically indistinguishable from changes
produced by a single, violent release of energy over a period of only
a few seconds at most? What has any atheist ever said about what
creationism teaches that misrepresents it as egregiously as the title
of this thread misrepresents what evolution actually proposes?

One of the chief evidences against atheism is the fact that they
even have to resort to such tactics in order to advance their cause.

It would be if they did, but they don't. In fact, creationists have
been known to go out of their way to discredit themselves without even
any help from the atheists. For example, Henry Morris and Duane Gish,
at a creationist seminar I attended in Worthington Ohio, presented a
lengthy exposition of a "vapor canopy" theory, which sought to
scientifically explain both Noah's Flood and the fossil record.
According to them, God created the world with a thick layer of water
vapor suspended high above the ground. They referred us to the verse
in Genesis that mentions separating the waters above the firmament
from the waters below the firmament. They suggested that the weight
of the water in this vapor canopy would have increased the air
pressure at sea level considerably, and argued that this extra air
pressure would promote longevity. According to this theory, this
vapor canopy suddenly collapsed, causing it to turn to a global
rainstorm, flooding the earth, stirring up sediments, and depositing
all the fossils, by normal operation of ordinary hydrological forces,
in one year.

Notice the problem? They had begun the seminar by saying the theistic
evolutionists showed a lack of faith in God when they attempted to
compromise by proposing that God worked His "miracles" by subtly
guiding the timing and direction of ordinary natural forces, and then
they turned around and changed the Flood from a supernatural miracle
into a purely natural process that was "miraculous" only in that God
was behind the scenes subtly guiding the timing and direction of the
process. Whoops. They had to cut God out of the picture to make
their theory scientific, and the parts where they left God in were the
parts that remained unscientific anyway. All their efforts to make
God more scientific only resulted in making them as bad at theology as
they were at science. And I'm not even bringing up the really funny
theories like how the fossils got sorted into ordered layers.

Bear in mind that I was still a Christian when I bought into
creationism, and was no less devout when I realized that the
creationists were discrediting themselves by their self-contradiction
and overt misrepresentation of the material they were dealing with. I
*wanted* them to be right. I *wanted* to believe them. I most
certainly was not running off to the atheists looking for some shallow
pretexts to justify a refusal to take the creationists' word for it.
I believed in God, I believed in Genesis, and the facts still came
down against the creationists, even without any input from the
atheists. Not only do atheists not need to resort to misrepresenting
the facts in order to discredit creationism, they don't necessarily
need to do anything at all, because if you're willing to test the
creationists against a simple standard of honesty, they routinely
discredit themselves.

Surely when God had interacted with the cosmos the way Genesis says He
did, that interaction has left behind abundant evidence of the
impact. Atheists ought to have a *much* better case at their
disposal--they shouldn't *need* to resort to misleading
characterizations of scientific theory in order to support their
claims.

Doesn't make much sense after you try and shoehorn your substitutions
into what I originally wrote, does it? You've ended up making the
second sentence a complete non sequitur vis a vis the sentence
immediately before. My original point was that if God had left
evidence of creation, that evidence should have been available to the
creationists, and should have been superior to any case they could
make by quoting scientists out of context. In your version, atheists
should have a much better case because why? Because God left lots of
evidence of Creation? That doesn't make much sense, now does it?
Turn the shoe around and try and put it on backwards--it just doesn't
fit.

Plus you have the problem that the sentence above is inconsistent with
the real world. A mere superstitious interpretation of nature is not
"evidence" in the scientific sense of the word. And ascribing
arbitrary, supernatural causes to observed phenomena is just
superstition. If there were more to creationist "evidence" than mere
superstition, then the compromise group between the creationists and
the evolutionists would be agnostic creationists, not theistic
evolutionists. I seem to recall someone posting numerous quotes from
scientists who believe in God, not too long ago ;)

Of course, the atheist has a much deeper dilemma, since his
position depends on assuming that there is no evidence for God.

Not at all, there is *tons* of evidence that relates to God, and it is
overwhelmingly consistent with the conclusion that God is a character
who actually appears only in the stories, superstitions and subjective
feelings of men. I myself became an atheist only after some three
decades of carefully considering the evidence, and was in fact
decidedly biased *against* atheism for all but the last 9 months of
that time.

The atheist position does not require one to *assume* that there is no
evidence for God. One can draw a reasonable, atheistic conclusion
just by observing what evidence does exist, and noting that the best
case that can be made for the Christian God is really no different in
character and verifiability than the best case that can be made for
any other god/gods/ghosts/fairies/spirits/etc. Given that they are
sufficiently mutually-contradictory that they can't all be true, and
that there is no objective fact(s) that singles out any one of them as
more real than the others, it is not unreasonable to conclude that
they are all similarly imaginary. If God chooses to make Himself
indistinguishable from the fairies, then it is obviously not His will
that we should believe in Him any more than we believe in them.
Perhaps atheists, after all, are God's only obedient children. ;-)

Since God wants us to have evidence of his

existence, he shows up now and then, like any other
loving father, and spends some time in face-to-face, tangible,

interaction with His children

Only in the stories men tell about God. Not in the real world.
Consider: if Jesus "rose" from the dead only the same way God "shows
up" to spend time with His children (i.e. only subjectively, in their
hearts), if Christ's resurrection was a "tangible" rising only in the
same sense as God "tangibly" interacts face-to-face in person with us
today, if the disciples "perceived" the risen Savior only in the same
sense as men today "perceive" the Father's presence among us today,
then how can you be so sure that the resurrection itself wasn't just
all in the disciples' heads?

The Christian justifies claiming that God reveals Himself by the
mental trick of convincing himself that purely subjective perceptions
are "spiritual" perceptions of a "spiritual" truth that is both more
true and more important than the mundane facts of real-world sensory
perceptions. Just as the believer today can sit in a church, and not
see God with his eyes or hear Him with his ears or touch Him with his
hands, and still insist that he can see and hear and feel God with him
in the room, by virtue of a subjective, non-sensory perception of
"spiritual reality," so too the early disciples could have sat in an
empty room, and--subjectively--perceived a "spiritual reality" of
Christ's departure from the tomb and resurrection from the dead. And
it would have been just as real to them as God's
subjectively-perceived presence is to Christians today. Even if they
still had Jesus' cold, dead body buried somewhere out of sight, that
transitory, material reality would be insignificant compared to the
glorious "truth" of the "spiritual reality" they perceived
subjectively. Jesus did not have to really rise from the dead in
order to start the story of Easter, and when you claim that God does
show up in person today to spend time visibly, audibly, and tangibly
interacting with His children, you demonstrate the conceptual
legerdemain that might just have made the resurrection myth happen.

And if there's some reason why atheism

can't give us actual objective evidence against His existence, then

suppose that anything atheists come up with will provide
us with evidence God apparently has given us already?

See what I mean about how poorly the shoe fits when you try and put it
on the other foot? You have atheists trying to come up with the same
evidence God "apparently has given us already"? Apparently? Don't
you know? :) Why would atheists be trying to come up with evidence
that God had already given us?

My original point was that *God* either is or is not willing to give
evidence of His existence. If He is willing, then we shouldn't need
creationists, we ought to be able to get our evidence from God
Himself. But if He's not willing, then whatever creationists have, it
isn't evidence of God, because it's not His will for us to have any
such evidence available. Try to recast that point as an argument
against atheism, and you've got a problem, because atheists rely on
the real world, not on supposed gods. You should have tried something
like, "If there's some reason the real world can't give us evidence of
God's non-existence, then atheists won't be able to come up with
anything that indicates God does not exist."

But the real world *does* provide us with lots of evidence against
God's existence--your loophole is that no one can provide *proof
beyond all doubt* of His non-existence. ;-) But the *evidence* of
God's nature as a fictional character is plentiful. The fact that we
never see Him behaving in the real world the way He is described in
Scripture as behaving (i.e. appearing visibly and audibly even in the
presence of skeptics, raising the dead, healing the blind, etc, etc).
The fact that He appears only in human stories, superstitions, and
subjective feelings. The fact that people who claim to know Him
produce increasingly divergent views of His will and character as time
goes on, rather than converging over time on a common, single,
objective reality of God. The fact that there are inconsistencies,
failed prophecies, historical errors, and other problems in the Bible.
And so on.

Plus there's the problem of trying to put the burden of proof on the
negative. A lack of evidence will always be more consistent with the
negative possibility than it is with the positive alternative.
Otherwise, I'll just claim that I have absolute incontrovertible proof
of God's non-existence, and challenge you to prove beyond all shadow
of doubt that no such proof exists. Must we assume that my proof
necessarily exists until its non-existence is proven beyond all doubt?
If I have such a proof, then God really does not exist, and if you
cannot prove that my proof does not exist, then you ought to assume
that I do have proof of God's non-existence.

But even without that, you are contradicting yourself when you assert
that God has given atheists evidence of His existence. If we're all
God's children, and if God actually does show up, tangibly, in person,
having visible, audible, tangible interactions with us, then there can
be no atheists. The Pharisees may have hated Jesus, but none of them
denied that he existed. Likewise, if God actually did show up and
spend time with us, no one would deny His existence, not even His
enemies. They'd hate Him and try to oppose Him, but there's no point
in denying His existence. A real, tangible, visible God can have
enemies, but not atheists.

So I'm sorry, but your attempt to try and put the shoe on the other
foot has only served as a case in point of what I was talking about
before. You gave it your best shot, and I suppose you did the best
you could, given what you've got to work with, but the result wound up
contradicting both itself and the facts, with a fair amount of
confusion and nonsense thrown in for good measure. If there really
were a creator God who really did want to give creationists a valid
case, I'm sure you could have had a lot better material to work with,
but then again if all that were true I doubt I'd be arguing against
you in the first place, since I would never have ceased to be a
creationist. But oh well...

m
aa#2115