A self-centered man-centered system is functioning on fear because if they ever admitted that there is a God, then they would be held accountable for their actions and their decisions. So, ultimately, it’s a cop-out on yours and so many oth…ers’ parts. You will bow your knee to no one but yourself. You cannot admit, and you have clearly shown that of late in your arguments here, that you could be wrong. You insist that I and the millions of other TRUE believers in the world are completely out of our minds, wrong, and have been the cause of all the problems in the world today. THAT, my friend, is a rash, judgemental statement to make. May I remind you of a man, a scientist, by the name of Josef Mengele, who, during WWII, used human beings for his scientific experiments and then KILLED them. He maimed, sterilized, and brutalized human beings ALL IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE!!!!!!! So, you cannot say that scientists have done nothing but good things to advance humanity because that is just a lie! In fact, the entire Nazi party propaganda preaching the annihilation of an entire people group in addition to those “less viable” in their opinions is a clear indication that scientists are not beyond evil behavior. NO ONE is beyond evil behavior….believer or unbeliever, we are all, I repeat all fallen creatures who have lost connection with our Creator. When one loses connection with the Creator, he has to invent his own form of reality, which is what you have done as have millions of others. There’s an old saying that says “God created man in His own image, and then man decided to return the favor.”

I  have absolutely no problem with the idea of religion itself. people having their own little gods and worlds of delusion is okay with me. but. if religion, and its institution starts to interfere with science, going so far as to decla…re it outright wrong, then we have a problem.

imagine a world without religion, belief in the spiritual, transcendent, stuff like that: there would have been no hanging, burning, stoning, drowning, etc. of millions of innocent people throughout history in the name of religion; groundbreaking theories of the past would have been accepted and studied further instead of being declared as heresy, thus by now we would be hundreds of years more advanced; there would be no churches to influence matters WAAAY beyond their business in anti-science ways; all of humanity would THINK and ACT instead of trusting in an imaginary being, thus increasing productivity and the all-around standard of living. and. so. on. bottom line: if religion didn’t exist, humanity would benefit from it so greatly i cannot even begin to describe.

now let me ask you this: has science ever had any negative effects on all of humanity throughout history? has someone ever killed anyone because their scientific findings were different for example? i admit that science sometimes kills people too through experiments going bad for example – but for the greater good: the technological advancement of the human race; not out of stupid superstition and fear of losing influence, like the church did. deaths i think are acceptable for the greater good of our race, because without them, we could simply not advance or species. but these deaths are in no way comparable to the mass slaughter of heretics and people of other faiths, which all happened because of people having different delusions, and by no means because of a greater good.

This is the same thing i’ve been mentioning throughout our debate. just because our science doesn’t know of something does not imply that that something h…as to be the handiwork of god. it just implies that we are unable to find the probably non-miraculous explanation just yet.

of course i admit that today’s science does not know all the answers, but assuming (let alone being 110% sure) that god is involved in every phenomenon which we don’t know much (or anything) about is, for lack of a better word, dumb, because just look at history: there were quite a number of things that were attributed to god, until they were revealed to be natural phenomena, devoid of any divine component.

again, just because we don’t have answers to everything doesn’t mean that the answers are divine. they MIGHT be divine, but see, there’s the difference between you and me. i say i don’t know (because, let’s face it, no one does), you say you know “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that it was your god. now, in actuality, you don’t “know”, you simply “believe”. i agree on something not being able to have come from nothing, but that’s not “short-changing science”, but saying “science does not know”. again, and i can’t stress this enough: you. don’t. know. either. this is something we can hopefully agree on, otherwise we can stop going around in circles right now. you being SURE is just you having faith, nothing else. do you know how ridiculous “i, as a human being, am *TOTALLY SURE* how the universe came into existence” sounds?

probably no human being will ever know how it came to exist, let alone how matter itself came about. the ones who say they do know, are lying or are delusional. there is no other explanation. oh wait, there is. god. but that assumption is just a BELIEF that people have, and in no way verifiable other than religious people having a certain feeling in themselves, namely, faith, which is, by definition, is believing in something that you have no evidence of, thus faith alone can not be accepted as proof.

bottom line: if we can not agree on the following statement being true, than there is no point in continuing our discussion about whether the universe was created with intent or was simply a coincidence:
no human being knows how the universe, or matter in the universe came to exist (we can speculate of course while having science or religion on our sides, but that’s another story; right now, no human knows for sure).

on another note, i admit looking up those scientists, yes i found that they are indeed actual scientists, but the rest of the scientific community heavily opposes their creationist views, because they consider creationism a belief (no surprise there), for there is not even remotely enough empirical evidence to support it.

first, about the video (The Privileged Planet):

you’re saying that I’m ignoring scientific data? the methods, thus conclusions of the authors of the video were not scientific, hence the position of creationism in today’s science -> religious idea. if any scientist would have ever been able to come up with any kind of actual scientific evidence to support creationism, and not subjective “this is too complex to have been…” argument, the idea would have its place in the scientific community as an alternative theory to interpret the universe. it is not there, it remains strictly a religious view, and scientists who came to the conclusion that there indeed has to be a creator, such as the astronomer in the video, have met quite a bit of opposition, and not because people cover their ears as soon as they hear intelligent design, but because the conclusions that are made by its supporters are so far-fetched and speculative that it would be degrading to call it science. I think greatly speculative fields, which, when explaining the workings of the universe, have arguments based on the human concepts of “too many” and the like, should not count as science.

I leave plenty of room for open discussion, however, i define science as something that has to be void of using any subjectivity when interpreting anything, and this video leaves a lot to be desired in that respect. again, there has not been any scientist who reached the conclusion, using scientific methods, i.e. experiments and actual objectively measurable data, that there must be a creator, hence, again, the solely religious position of intelligent design in today’s science. there are only people who are biased towards creationism, and cherrypick from their findings to support their beliefs, speculating and jumping to far-fetched conclusions, but presenting them as hardcore science. that is not actual science, no matter how hard they’d like it to be.

A hint: try to get “The Case for Faith” and “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel.

Would it really be a huge stretch calling the term “love” simply “not specific enough”? i think not. both of them manifest spiritually as well as physically (wanting to hug your parents for example), so it is understandable that people see the two so closely together as to have given them the same name. still, i agree that they’re distinct emotions, simply because of, yes, different chemicals.

where do morals stem from. so what is morality? it is basically the differentiation between good and bad. now i assume you’re asking how we came to have an agreement on what good and bad things are. i also also assume you’re saying it could have only come from god, because human beings can not discover on their own what is good and bad (because if they could, there would be no need for god). okay. how could humans discover that god was good and satan was evil? if you asked god and satan which one of them was evil, how would you know which one to believe? on the basis of the standard god wrote down of course. wait, why not the one wrote by satan? what is a valid way of figuring out which one is which – without randomly picking one of course – without having an ability to discover it own your own? but then again, if people can do that, then there’s no need for god.
“but since god created everything, he decides what’s right or wrong” – and you know this because god told you that he was the one who did it. if satan claimed that he himself had created everything, and that god was his creation as well, how could we decide who was telling the truth?

the logical conclusion is that human beings are able to distinguish right from wrong themselves. no morals are absolute, you just have to simply “do unto others as you would have done to you” i think, and this sums up the whole idea. and just because this is in the bible, it doesn’t mean it stems from god himself, but that people who wrote the bible figured some great morals out themselves.