If there is no God. Then someone explain life.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

See. You guys can not have an intelligent conversation.

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No need with you.

[Baruch]

I don't like that answer. That is just like me saying I believe in God because I read the bible.

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The Bible is part of religion.  You reject religion, so you need to reject the Bible ... pragmatically.  Encounter G-d in the poor and injured folks about you.  Socrates said that books are the death of education ... and he was right.

[PopeyesPappy]

Then lets talk about it. Im all about be rational but when the response from you guys gets insulting then what am I supposed to do. Its obvious we don't believe in the same thing. Who knows maybe I can learn something.

OK then...

Christianity is true if and ONLY if the god of the Old Testament is true.
The god of the Old Testament is false.
Therefore Christianity is false.

How do we know the god of the Old Testament is false? Because the evidence tells us he is false.

1. The Biblical story of Genesis is false.

A. Creation didn't happen the way it is described in the Bible. The evidence says our universe began a little less than 14 billion years ago in an event called the big bang. We don't know what precipitated the big bang, but there are a number of possibilities that don't include god. As the universe cooled following the big bang hydrogen and a small amount of helium formed. It wasn't distributed uniformly. This allowed gravity to cause it gather into dense areas. When enough hydrogen collected in a small enough area heat and pressure started the process of nuclear fusion, and the first stars were born. The nuclear in these stars created most of the helium and all the other elements elements in the universe today. The largest of the stars collapse and explode in an event called a super nova scattering these elements and seeding the area around them.

About 4.5 billion years ago our sun and its solar system formed from the debris left from the early generation stars. Within a billion years life appeared on Earth. We don't know how, but once again there are possibilities that don't include god. One thing we do know though is that there isn't anything special about life. It doesn't violate any physical laws that would require a supernatural kick start to get it going. It is just another complex chemical process.

Once life started it began to evolve in a process we call evolution. One life form led to another and another and another over billions of years until we ended up with everything alive we see today. All the available evidence points to evolution being responsible for the diversity of life on Earth today. None of the evidence contradicts evolution.

B. There was no flood. At least not the global flood described in the Bible. There is no evidence that supports this event. There is evidence that says it didn't happen including among other things DNA evidence that rules out a population bottle neck in all species including humans within the last few thousand years.

According to Ken Ham's timeline for the flood we even know that Unas was Pharaoh of Egypt at the time. We know about when he ascended to the throne, how long he ruled and who ruled after him. We know the Egyptian civilization (or any of the others that existed at the time) were not interrupted by a world wide flood.

We also know that the flood story along with the Eden and other parts of the Genesis were borrowed from earlier Mesopotamian mythology. These stories are not original to the Jewish narrative. They were borrowed from others.


Next up, Exodus...

[g2perk]

OK then...

Christianity is true if and ONLY if the god of the Old Testament is true.
The god of the Old Testament is false.
Therefore Christianity is false.

How do we know the god of the Old Testament is false? Because the evidence tells us he is false.

1. The Biblical story of Genesis is false.

A. Creation didn't happen the way it is described in the Bible. The evidence says our universe began a little less than 14 billion years ago in an event called the big bang. We don't know what precipitated the big bang, but there are a number of possibilities that don't include god. As the universe cooled following the big bang hydrogen and a small amount of helium formed. It wasn't distributed uniformly. This allowed gravity to cause it gather into dense areas. When enough hydrogen collected in a small enough area heat and pressure started the process of nuclear fusion, and the first stars were born. The nuclear in these stars created most of the helium and all the other elements elements in the universe today. The largest of the stars collapse and explode in an event called a super nova scattering these elements and seeding the area around them.

About 4.5 billion years ago our sun and its solar system formed from the debris left from the early generation stars. Within a billion years life appeared on Earth. We don't know how, but once again there are possibilities that don't include god. One thing we do know though is that there isn't anything special about life. It doesn't violate any physical laws that would require a supernatural kick start to get it going. It is just another complex chemical process.

Once life started it began to evolve in a process we call evolution. One life form led to another and another and another over billions of years until we ended up with everything alive we see today. All the available evidence points to evolution being responsible for the diversity of life on Earth today. None of the evidence contradicts evolution.

B. There was no flood. At least not the global flood described in the Bible. There is no evidence that supports this event. There is evidence that says it didn't happen including among other things DNA evidence that rules out a population bottle neck in all species including humans within the last few thousand years.

According to Ken Ham's timeline for the flood we even know that Unas was Pharaoh of Egypt at the time. We know about when he ascended to the throne, how long he ruled and who ruled after him. We know the Egyptian civilization (or any of the others that existed at the time) were not interrupted by a world wide flood.

We also know that the flood story along with the Eden and other parts of the Genesis were borrowed from earlier Mesopotamian mythology. These stories are not original to the Jewish narrative. They were borrowed from others.


Next up, Exodus...

The simple truth of the creation story is that God is the author of creation. In Genesis 1, we are presented with the beginning of a divine drama that can only be examined and understood from the standpoint of faith. How long did it take? How did it happen, exactly? No one can answer these questions definitively. In fact, these mysteries are not the focus of the creation story. The purpose, rather, is for moral and spiritual revelation.

As for as plants go the interesting part of the account is that God did not create the plants in the manner we might assume He did. Instead of creating a world filled with full-grown plants, God actually created seeds and planted those. We understand this from the word "sprout,"which refers to God allowing the earth to produce plants through germination (sprouting). The Hebrew word dasha tells us that God used processes identical to what we see on the earth today. Plants spouted, grew to maturity, and produced seeds

As for as the earth being over 14 billion years old that is just a theory according to multiple scholars. The big bang is a theory as well. Since most of the measurement merely involve the counting of annual layers, they are unlikely to be grossly inaccurate. Therefore, the young earth paradigm that the earth is merely 6,000 years old is falsified by both the Bible and science. The vast ages of the earth does not diminish the power and glory of God, but establishes that God thought that preparing the earth for human habitation was worth the billion of years of preparation Since God is not subject to the temporal dimension of this universe,it all happened "instantly" for Him.

Now lets ask a scientist about the great flood.

According  Robert Ballard : " a controversial theory proposed by two Columbia University scientists, there really was one in the Black Sea region. They believe that the now-salty Black Sea was once an isolated freshwater lake surrounded by farmland, until it was flooded by an enormous wall of water from the rising Mediterranean Sea. The force of the water was two hundred times that of Niagara Falls, sweeping away everything in its path".

He also stated " Four hundred feet below the surface, they unearthed an ancient shoreline, proof to Ballard that a catastrophic event did happen in the Black Sea. By carbon dating shells found along the shoreline, Ballard said he believes they have established a timeline for that catastrophic event, which he estimates happened around 5,000 BC. Some experts believe this was around the time when Noah's flood could have occurred".

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[stromboli]

Catastrophic event happened in the Black Sea, which was a possible cause for the Gilgamesh legend to be created, which was stolen and converted into Noah's flood.

The earth is 4.5 billion years old, not 14. As for scientific theory:

A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world.

You apparently don't have much understanding of science.

[stromboli]

And about Ballard's claim:

http://www.skepticink.com/lateraltruth/2012/12/19/robert-ballard-goes-out-of-his-depth/

The Flood connection began with the publication in the late 1990s of the “Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis”, by geophysicist Walter Pitman and marine geologist William Ryan: the hypothesis that the Black Sea catastrophically flooded in about 5600 BC when the Aegean burst through a sill at the Bosporus, sending two hundred Niagaras-worth of water per day crashing through the gap for up to three hundred days.  Ryan and Pitman went on to speculate that (a) the land thus flooded had previously been heavily populated, (b) the displaced survivors spread out across Europe, the Near East and even further afield, taking the Neolithic with them, and (c) folk memories of this catastrophe eventually morphed into the myth of the Great Noachian Flood.

Ballard, setting out to prospect for shipwrecks in the Black Sea, picked up on this idea with great gusto, and added the search for drowned Neolithic habitation sites â€" jokingly referred to as “Noah’s house” â€" to his research program.  He found wrecks, all right, the earliest dating to 500 BC, spectacularly preserved in the anoxic waters and with cargoes of pottery jars still intact.  More to the point, Ballard also announced in 2000 that he had found the remains of human-built structures 300 feet below the surface, on a paleo-shoreline claimed to be the pre-Deluge edge of the sea.  Slam-dunk for the Deluge Hypothesis â€" that was Ballard’s position in 2000, and it appears to be his position in 2012.

But there are problems.  The Ryan/Pitman hypothesis was controversial from the start, and there is now enough counter-evidence to â€" ahem â€" pretty much blow it out of the water.  Any post-glacial rise in the level of the Black Sea appears to have been considerably earlier, gentler, and less extensive than in Ryan and Pitman’s (and by extension, Ballard’s) model.  No sudden sill collapse, no terrifying multi-Niagara of water, no shocked survivors heading for the hills bearing their culture on their backs.

Another problem is the linkage of flooding in the Black Sea with Noah’s Deluge, i.e., the idea that the folk memory of this specific disastrous flood gave rise to the Sumerian and later legends.  This was pure speculation on Ryan and Pitman’s part, untestable, simplistic, archaeologically implausible, and smelling of pseudohistory.  Furthermore, it would make little sense to look for the roots of Sumerian myths so far away, in the region of the Black Sea.  Better to look at the post-glacial flooding of what is now the Persian Gulf, which is right there.  And even in that case, linking the event to the myth could still never be more than speculation.  The same goes for the attractive but untestable idea that post-glacial flooding and marine transgression gave rise to flood myths all around the globe.

It is fair to say that a catastrophic event happened that triggered the Gilgamesh legend that eventually was converted into Noah's flood. But at best Ballard's claim is a hypothesis and far from proven.

[PopeyesPappy]

Just a theory. If I had a nickle for every time I've heard a that... I'd be very surprised if you can even define the word theory as it is used in science.

I didn't say the Earth was 14 billion years old. I said the universe is. The big bang is the cosmological model that best explains the observations. It isn't fact, but it is the best explanation we have for what we can see based on the evidence available to us. That evidence contradicts Genesis. What that means is that your divinely inspired book is wrong.

The Earth on the other hand is about 4.5 billion years old. That evidence isn't based on layers. It is based on physics. If you would like an idea of how that works then read this paper by your fellow Christian Roger Wiens.

There is no evidence your god created the seeds in the Earth. The evidence says they evolved just like every other living thing on the planet. Waving the Bible around isn't evidence god did it because the information in the Bible is not reliable. It contradicts the available evidence.

Noah's flood didn't happen period. There was no global flood. There was no arc with 2 of each kind. Everyone but Noah's family didn't die. The story was plagiarized from earlier Mesopotamian mythology. The information contained in the Bible is NOT reliable. As far as the Black Sea goes I prefer the flooding of the Persian Gulf area about 10,000 years ago at the end of the last glacial maximum for historical origins of the flood story, but Persian Gulf or Black Sea doesn't make the Flood story in Bible true.

[PopeyesPappy]

You apparently don't have much understanding of science.

Duh...

[g2perk]

Catastrophic event happened in the Black Sea, which was a possible cause for the Gilgamesh legend to be created, which was stolen and converted into Noah's flood.

The earth is 4.5 billion years old, not 14. As for scientific theory:

You apparently don't have much understanding of science.

Yeah enough to know that a theory has to be proven to be a fact. And the big bang is a theory.

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[g2perk]

Just a theory. If I had a nickle for every time I've heard a that... I'd be very surprised if you can even define the word theory as it is used in science.

I didn't say the Earth was 14 billion years old. I said the universe is. The big bang is the cosmological model that best explains the observations. It isn't fact, but it is the best explanation we have for what we can see based on the evidence available to us. That evidence contradicts Genesis. What that means is that your divinely inspired book is wrong.

The Earth on the other hand is about 4.5 billion years old. That evidence isn't based on layers. It is based on physics. If you would like an idea of how that works then read this paper by your fellow Christian Roger Wiens.

There is no evidence your god created the seeds in the Earth. The evidence says they evolved just like every other living thing on the planet. Waving the Bible around isn't evidence god did it because the information in the Bible is not reliable. It contradicts the available evidence.

Noah's flood didn't happen period. There was no global flood. There was no arc with 2 of each kind. Everyone but Noah's family didn't die. The story was plagiarized from earlier Mesopotamian mythology. The information contained in the Bible is NOT reliable. As far as the Black Sea goes I prefer the flooding of the Persian Gulf area about 10,000 years ago at the end of the last glacial maximum for historical origins of the flood story, but Persian Gulf or Black Sea doesn't make the Flood story in Bible true.

This discussion is not about what you think. What do you know any way. What the hell does any scientist and or theologian know what happen billions of years ago. Are you a scientist. Do you even have a job.

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[PopeyesPappy]

See. You aren't interested in a discussion. You just want to wave your Bible around and claim therefore God.

[g2perk]

And about Ballard's claim:

http://www.skepticink.com/lateraltruth/2012/12/19/robert-ballard-goes-out-of-his-depth/

It is fair to say that a catastrophic event happened that triggered the Gilgamesh legend that eventually was converted into Noah's flood. But at best Ballard's claim is a hypothesis and far from proven.

Such as the bang bang

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[Blackleaf]

So since you decided not to address a single question I asked, let's create a map of our conversation to see where this has taken us. The red signals changes in the topic.

You: Religion dominates the mind, but faith frees it.

Are religion and faith are different? Religion = good, faith = bad?

Me: Faith is a part of religion. It is the very part that blinds the mind to religious beliefs.

You: Religion and faith don't go together. Name one book that says so. And you don't know anything about faith.

Are religion and faith are different? Also, Blackleaf doesn't know what faith is like.

Me: The Oxford English Dictionary. And I was a Christian for 24 years.

You: 24 years in the trash. And I'm the ass.

Blackleaf wasted his years of belief by converting. g2perk is an ass.

Me: Yes. You're an ass.

Noticing a pattern here? I prove you wrong, and instead of admitting you're wrong like a mature person, you change the topic. You make baseless claims, I provide evidence in my counterclaims. This is just one string of our conversations, but the same patterns have been in all of our conversations (if you can even call them that). You are pathetic, g2perk. You come to atheist forums, make baseless claims, and expect us to just take your word for it. And when people call you out on it, you act like a child. I have a personal code to give new comers the benefit of the doubt, but I knew your kind right away.

[Blackleaf]

Yeah enough to know that a theory has to be proven to be a fact. And the big bang is a theory.

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You don't even read before you spew your bullshit everywhere, do you?

[stromboli]

Lol Pappy you can dump this guy any time you want. He's used up any goodwill he had coming, if any.