"That was not my claim. That is the narrative you want to make. What I've been saying, is your belief is illogical. If there is an all loving powerful god, there is no need for any suffering or even being here. He could just plop you down in heaven to begin with and avoid the suffering of this world, and you would be the same person, soul or spirit, whatever you believe, without having endured this life. Do you really believe that molested children are better off? Apparently a lot of clergy must believe that."
Simply put, you have failed to logically refute that it is possible for a better, or best, good to come from allowing suffering, compared to not having any suffering at all.
Only if your god isn't all loving and/or all powerful. Otherwise, your argument is totally illogical. Keep trying to force that square peg in the round hole, if you want.
"They recognize there is no Judeo/Christian/Islamic god. There are far more top scientists who are atheist or agnostic, believe that science is at odds with belief in your type of god. And why do you suppose they are not Christians? Because they came to the same conclusion as Stephen Hawking. - "I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful." Stephen Hawking
Your top scientists believe because the want to believe, and they try to devise ways to rationalize their belief. Invoking any god as an explanation simply is not required to explain anything."
I can also argue that YOUR scientists are rationalizing their beliefs. What you should be realizing is that what all this shows is that belief in a God is not a scientifically refutable position. Scientific knowledge does not preclude a belief in God. In fact, as many top scientists have acknowledged, it points to it.
Most scientists rely on the evidence of reality and the fact that you don't need to invoke a god or gods to explain anything. You leave out an important point in your claims. Some scientists who believe in the possibility of a deity, don't believe it is the Judeo/Christian/Islamic god, or any other god. Your argument, if true, doesn't preclude that deity from being any of the other various manmade gods, nor even the infamous "Flying Spaghetti Monster."
"Life does not exist ubiquitous in the universe because the environment is hostile, and given the size of the universe the sparsity of life attests to that. That doesn't mean that I don't believe there are other life forms, and even intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe. Life is fragile, as evidenced by mass extinction events, and the resets of the direction of evolution in our own history. We're in a mass extinction event now, and there no doubt will be others in the future."
As the top scientists have learned, the ONLY way ANY universe can exist to support life, is for all the universal constants and quantities to fall in the exquisitely fine-tuned range that our universe exists in. So in other words, virtually NO OTHER universe could theoretically have existed that could support the amount of life that we have in our universe. The odds are astronomically, infinitesimally small. So your argument is essentially meaningless. Virtually ANY conceivable universe would be "hostile to life". We just happen to find ourselves in a universe that does. So the question isn't why is our universe hostile to life, but rather, why did we end up with one that does allow life, against extraordinarily enormous, enormous odds? I truly believe God intended it this way, so that upon discovering that fact, it would be plainly obvious there was intent and purpose, i.e. a mind, behind it all. Unfortunately, there are none so blind as those who will not see.
That's not right at all. Science tells us it's entirely possible that there are other universes with different constants and laws that govern their existence and that could have different life forms. There is no reason to believe that there cannot be a universe with silica based life forms, or some other unknown element. In fact our universe is not perfect for longevity of life. IF omega were 1, and the total energy of the universe were zero, life could go on without limitation. However, we know that omega is about .3, the total energy of the universes is not quite zero, and that the energy in empty space will continue to cause accelerated expansion, which ultumately will not end well for life. Omega would be one in a perfect universe for life. This universe is hostile to life overall, but it is not surprising, given the size of the universe that there are some oasis scattered throughout the universe where conditions are temporarily right for the existence of life forms. Your question about why we ended up in a universe that allows life presupposes there is a purpose behind this universe. There is no evidence of any purpose behind this universe. A better question, is how we ended up with life in this universe, something science can answer and Christianity cannot.
"The earth will come to an end, but not through your religious scenario."
I put far more weight upon the one who died and came back, who told us that it will, rather than the assumptions of a feeble, limited, fallible mind.
Really? You're description of feeble, limited and fallible minds is exactly the mind of primitive first century iron age and earlier primitive people, who didn't even know the earth orbited the sun. Your primitive people invented many different religions and gods with outlandish and unbelievable tales to account for what their minds could not comprehend.
"I have far more evidence than your opposing claim. It's clear that consciousness and awareness are products of the brain. That is simply indisputable."
Sorry, no, you have NO evidence that consciousness and awareness are ONLY products of the physical brain. The only way we can know whether it is or not is for someone to come back from the dead and tell and show us. We have that, based on the written historical testimonies of those who witnessed the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, one of them being the apostle Paul, who you affirmed as being a contemporary and associate of Jesus' own disciples, having written his testimony within decades of Jesus' life.
Your claim is based upon flimsy evidence, if you want to accept unbelievable claims as evidence. I've pointed out previously that absent brain function there is no consciousness and awareness, and partial brain damage can lead to partial or impaired consciousness and awareness. That is demonstrable and testable evidence. You have nothing that is demonstrable or testable. There is no credible evidence of mysticism behind consciousness. It's pretty clear that when your brain dies, your soul (consciousness and awareness) dies. Since dogs and cats have much more limited consciousness and awareness than Homo sapiens, does that mean their souls are smaller?
"There is absolutely no reason to believe that any god is pulling strings behind the scenes."
The reasons to believe are strong for all the reasons that I've discussed in this forum, and the plain fact is you have failed to invalidate any one of them. No matter how many times you repeat to yourself that there's no reason, it doesn't make it so.
I think it's more the other way around. I'm waiting for any empirical objective evidence you can produce to substantiate your mystic claims.
"The task of science is to continue to chip away at the unknown. We're learning more and more about ourselves from a neurological standpoint. It is abundantly clear that when you irreparably damage the brain you can lose mental and physical functions, including consciousness and awareness. The degree of injury determines the degree of loss of those functions, ranging from partial to complete. If there is a soul, as you hypothesize, it would be dependent upon the brain for existence. And, what good would it do to have a soul if it isn't tied to a brain to give you awareness and consciousness? You would be asleep according to you."
Leading experts in the neurology fields acknowledge that they don't have any bridge between the gap that exists between biology and mind. Therefore, your assertion that the soul depends on the brain for existence is pure speculation. If I may speculate here a bit, it may be that a soul tied to a physical brain is subjected to the constraints of that physical brain while alive; thus injury, dysfunction, and sleep can disrupt our consciousness and self awareness temporarily. Once the soul is released from the physical brain upon death, we might be capable of much, much more now that the physical constraints are removed.
Sure they do. Where is your soul?? What is it made of?? Your claims are all speculation with a hint of science fiction. Where is your evidence for a soul tied to a brain, and how is it tied? If it were true, then what you're saying is it is dependent upon the brain, which we know is temporal.
If, however, the fact is that we do stay "asleep" after death, that may be the reason why Jesus says he is going to give those he resurrects from death a new body and new brain for our soul to be "awake" again- a brain that has far, far more capabilities than our previous one, including the ability to experience love, joy, and happiness. This is a hope based on faith in Jesus. And again, we have good reasons to have faith in Jesus for all the reasons put forth.
Where do you think your soul came from? What is its origin? The process for your brain development started at conception. Where was your soul before that? And, again, if god is all powerful and all loving (stress all loving) why wouldn't he just start with the equivalent of a resurrected body and brain experiencing love, joy, and happiness ab initio. Otherwise he is not all loving or all powerful.
"You haven't shown anything of the sort. The world and history is full of charlatans, imposters, and people whose legends were embellished and exalted to levels beyond that of their mortal existence. Christianity bears every mark of such."
Your opinion that you failed to prove. That's the bottom line. It even ignores all the strong evidence to the contrary. This is just the belief that you have chosen.
You're the one making extraordinary claims with WEAK evidence, not me.
"In fact it is completely irrational to believe any of the Christian legends. That is why Christians require faith. I'll grant you there is a vested interest of Christian apologists who have made a profession and racket out of trying to rationalize the irrational over the years."
I have given very strong, very rational reasons to believe them. Just because you reject them simply because you don't want to believe them, it doesn't make them irrational. Yes, it still requires faith, but faith is not founded on irrationality, it is founded on rationality. Everyone makes a leap of faith at some point. You do so, in your rejection of these beliefs in favor of embracing a belief that things happened, the odds against which are so improbable, so immensely and infinitesimally small, that it is unreasonable. Some might call THAT irrational. So what's the name of your religion?
If what you say were true, no faith would be needed. The odds of a particular sperm uniting with particular egg in the chains of conceptions leading up to your conception is also infinitesimally small, yet probable. If something is probable, then at some point it may occur.
"However, Quantum Mechanics gives us the best of answers, explaining how something can in fact come from nothing, without a causal agent. Spontaneous origin is the most likely reason we are here. It fits very well with the observations being made about the universe and its expansion. Your imagination just says God did it, without any evidence or mechanism for how he did it. Quantum Mechanics tells us God isn't needed."
Quantum cosmology doesn't give us any answers, it only deals with mathematical and imaginary abstractions rather than observable astronomy and physics. It deals with the physics of the universe at the earliest beginning when the universe was so tiny that it isn't known how gravity works. Thus, it has allowed theoretical physicists to play with the numbers. Physicists developed a wave function of the universe that might happen at the quantum level, that depends on quantum fluctuations which could produce a set of possible universes, one which could have been our own.
The problems with this universe wave theory in quantum cosmology are these:
1) It is still based on the singularity model understanding of the universe, thus there's still a singularity, thus a beginning that it doesn't account for. Thus, it is NOT showing that something came out of nothing. Oops.
2) It is math. Math doesn't cause things to come into existence. Math doesn't cause anything to happen, it is causally inert. It's a concept that exists in - yep, you guessed it - minds. In fact, one of the proponents of this very quantum cosmology that you're espousing, Alexander Vilenkin, even reflects on this fact, acknowledging that math indeed is a concept in the mind, so therefore he asks a rhetorical question - "Are we therefore saying that a mind predates the universe?" The other proponent of quantum cosmology, Stephen Hawking, said in his book A Brief History of Time - "What puts fire in the equations that gives us a universe to describe? The equations don't give us a universe to describe. Something else must do that." So even the proponents of quantum cosmology are acknowledging that they haven't really shown a non-causal origin of the universe.
3) To get the universal wave function in quantum cosmology that is needed to explain the origin of the universe, physicists need to solve the Wheeler-Dewitt equation. However, this equation yields an infinite number of solutions, therefore physicists have to consciously choose boundary constraints in this equation, with the purpose of ending up with a universe like ours!! So this only supports the idea of a mind behind a universe, i.e. intelligent design!!
You're off in the weeds trying to impart opinions to people that they don't hold, and ignoring that we have very plausible mathematical explanations of a spontaneous universe without cause. Hawking, Guth and many others acknowledge that, including Vilenkin. You have no mathematical explanations for any of your mystical beliefs. Just mysticism.