Milo
DrTyore;357371 wrotePeople everywhere have "used" faith since the beginning of time... which is IMO one of the reasons for religion... There's no god, there's a boogeyman to keep them in check, kool-aid for the masses.
Religion is the intellectual and emotional equivalent of the fat people scooters... takes all the heavy lifting off ya, and gives me a reason to mock.
Mark
Except that I do understand your point. You fail to acknowledge what I said about my own journey back to Faith.
True Faith is not easy . . . it is in fact incredibly hard. But the rewards are infinite in their scope.
The "boogeyman" aspect you mention, while accurate as far as it goes, is a corruption of Faith. It is also something that is so obviously pointed out and debunked as to be meaningless. You can, and have, looked upon the entire argument of
Failure of man v. failure of Faith as some sort of sidestepping of responsibility but I would argue that it is about putting responsibility where it belongs.
I am honest enough to admit that my Faith is not as strong as it should be. I am a failed Catholic, but I am hopeful of one day renewing my Faith. That is not an abdication of responsibility, nor is it weakness (well, weakness of Faith, perhaps). It is rather a desire for greater strength in upholding and representing my Faith so that, in the end, I can face my Creator with a clear conscience and a pure heart.
Milo
As do we all. A dog can be trained, as can a host of other lower animals. A person can be trained to respond in certain ways as well. It means nothing . . . a person who regurgitates scripture flawlessly is no more righteous than the person who ignores the teachings of Christ.
Matthew 7 15-20
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. you will know them by their fruits. Do men gather fruits from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown in the fire. Therefore by their fruits shall ye know them.
trigs
I apologize for the length of this post and the tardiness i showed to write it. To be honest, it was more difficult for me to write up compared to part 1 since I had studied all the evidence in part 1 previously. Enjoy!
Part 2: With Big Numbers Comes Big Responsibility
When we as humans talk about the universe, we tend to gloss over certain facts that, with all due respect, our brains truly can't fathom. When some of the actual numbers are considered with as much effort as we can muster, the significance of our existence certainly becomes feeble. Furthermore, the chance of organic life coming into being somewhere in the universe seems fairly likely. Here are a few numbers that we must keep in mind when considering the chance of our existence with respect to the universe as a whole:
First of all, we must consider the fact that we are limited in the capacity of what we can see of our universe. The "observable universe" consists of all the light that has traveled from the objects in space and that has reached Earth so that we have been able to observe it. The best estimate of the diameter of the observable universe is 28 billion parsecs or 93 billion light years (93,000,000,000!) - which means that the edge of the observable universe is about 46 billion light years* away.
*A quick explanation of light years is necessary I think in order for us to truly attempt to comprehend the enormity we're discussing here. The alleged fastest possible speed anything in the universe can travel is light speed. Light speed is considered to be exactly 299,792,458 metres per second. If we were able to travel that fast, it would still take us about 46 billion years to reach the end of the known universe (just imagine what we might observe if we could see beyond!). To put this in some perspective, the fastest humans have been able to travel (not including the Earth's rotation, etc.) was 39,897 km/h during the Apollo 10 mission (btw, just to compare in the same measurement, light speed is 1,079,252,848.8 km/h). Wow, the known universe is big - and there's still more out there we can't see yet!
Another significant number to consider is the amount of stars in the universe. Currently we cannot know for certain how many stars there are, but best guesses put the range somewhere between 10^22 to 10^24 (that is at least 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars!). It is reasonably assumed that there are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe and there are roughly 100 billion stars per galaxy. It is a fact that every single star has a circumstellar habitable zone (aka Goldilocks zone) in which orbiting planets can support liquid water. What this means is that any planets orbiting stars within this zone have the potential to produce organic life.
Furthermore, consider that the universe is considered to be approximately 13.77 billion years old. In comparison, homo sapiens are considered to be only 200,000 years old. To put this in perspective, modern humans have only existed in the universe for around 0.00001452% of the total time the universe has existed.
One more number I'd like to include is the chance of being dealt a royal flush: it is 4 out of 2,598,960 which is 0.00015% (that is, being dealt 5 cards only and getting a royal flush with no additional draws). I know players who have been playing for years and have never gotten a royal flush.
Now, you are probably asking why are all these numbers significant in reference to the argument of atheism? Let's consider it from this point of view. Does it make more sense that God created all of this entire universe just so we humans could grow and develop on one single, tiny planet while the rest of the universe sat dormant of organic life, or that organic life as we know it was created simply from random chance since there are so many, SO MANY, opportunities for it to arise?
If the chance of organic life beginning around a random star in the universe was the same chance as getting dealt a royal flush, then there would potentially be approximately 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 amount of stars being orbited by a planet with organic life somewhere in the universe! (Yes,I know this math is not exact because not every star has planets orbiting it and some have more than one, but despite that the example serves the purpose.) That is a lot, but even if the chance was way WAY less than that, it's easy to see that there is still very good odds that somewhere in the universe organic life could spring up just from the sheer number of chances for it to do so. Not to mention, humans have been around for an extremely miniscule amount of time in the universe. It's definitely possible that entire civilizations and species on other planets have come and gone millions or even billions of years before we were even able to begin observing!
(A couple side notes to consider that I won't get into detail about, but are very significant in this argument, are the assumptions that there is only one universe (as opposed to the theory of the 'multiverse') and that there has only ever been one Big Bang. Some theorize multiple big bangs throughout history while others suggest multiple big bangs happening simultaneously all the time in various universes!)
Moreover, if any other planet in the entire universe were to have organic life, especially any form of intelligent or even semi-intelligent life, God and religion would fail and crumble. Nowhere has any major religion, nor major God for that matter, discussed any possibility of life outside of our planet. Practically all religions deem us, humans, as the bee's knees - the main result of creation. They all argue that we are the pinnacle of the existence of life in the universe. Any proof of life forms from another planet would bring almost all religious doctrines crashing down.
The numbers don't lie, but humans tend to most of the time.
Stay tuned (eventually) for Part 3: Intelligent Design or Stupid Human Minds?