I'd like you to tell me where God came from.

It's a good question, Shiyiya, and you're correct: no Christian, or anyone else, can tell you where God came from. It's not like He lives over on the next block, or just dropped in from the next Universe over. If you would, however, please pass the following answer back to your Christian friend.

It seems to me that since something exists, there must be a brute fact, an explanation that cannot be explained, underlying existence, independent of whether one is atheist or theist. One can escape this conclusion if one believes that something can come from nothing, or that everything is an illusion. If you reject both of these propositions, then the only seemingly available logical option is that something must be eternal, that is to say, it has the power of being within itself, or is ontologically necessary.

Thus, the universe, or some natural, physical property related to the universe--a multiverse or universe generator, say--may simply be a brute fact. It exists necessarily and eternally; it has the power of being. No atheist should be faulted logically for holding this view.

If this is not the case, and obviously theists believe they have good cause to think it is not, there is presumably only one other option open to us to explain being: a supernatural realm or a supernatural being such as God. This being or realm would be a brute fact, in much the same manner as an eternal, natural realm. If it’s true that no atheist should be faulted for holding to a brute fact, and I think it is, it’s hard for me to accept that a theist would be faulted for holding to a brute fact.

In addition, it is impossible to conceive of the Christian God coming from anywhere, by definition. If He could arise out of nothingness, or be created, He wouldn't be God, as conceived by Christians. So, by definition, if He exists, He simply has to be there as a brute fact.

It appears, then, that a brute fact is required logically to explain existence, regardless of whether one is an atheist or theist. What we argue about is what that brute fact, or necessary being, actually is:)

None of this says anything about whether He does exist, it only demonstrates that it is a logical potentiality, and satisfies your question, even while acknowledging that there's no explanation for the explanation (enter Modus stage left). For what it's worth, if I were you, I'd approach this potentiality just as you have, by wondering why we would add this extra explanation. After all, we know the universe is there, given that it's not an illusion. For instance, If I understand Mr. Dawkins correctly, he asks why we would posit something more complex than the universe to answer this question, rather than settling for the simpler answer that we immediately observe.

Okay. You want someone to tell you how the universe was formed, if it wasn't made by god. Specifically:

1. Proof that the universe is eternal and/or caused itself.

Okay. This is less specifically at this one guy, because he says he's not a creationist, which is weird if he claims to follow the bible, but whatever. This is at all Christianity - I ask anyone I can this question, and I have yet to get a satisfactory answer - most of the time I don't get an answer at all. My favourite intelligent nice reasonable Christian friend said "Hm, I'll have to think about that".

You want us to prove where the universe and life came from, if they were not created by god.

I'd like you to tell me where God came from. If anything resembling life requires a creator - Who created the creator? All you're doing by saying god made it is moving the question of how one step back and getting defensive if anyone questions how *your* illogical thing works. I will admit - yeah, we don't know exactly how life began. But guys, saying 'god did it' doesn't really answer any questions - it just raises the same question again, only a step further removed. Occam's razor - I'm going to believe that version *without* an invisible dude in the sky.

Once they understand that arguing on little evidence about individual humans won't prove anything about what religion or it's lack will make an individual do....

Then you can talk about the Inquisition! An organised practice of ritual torture carried on for in excess of 400 years, by large numbers of deeply religious men, for absolutely positively explicitly religious reasons. Some of xianity's most famous theologians considered the issue at length, and concluded that since it was for the greater glory of their imaginary friend, it was all cool. It was only stopped ~350 years ago.

That's right folks, it took your high and mighty moral xian's 400 years to figure out that not only will inserting an expanding device in a witches vagina and using it to shatter her pelvis fail to get you a true confession of her "sins", it's just a bad idea. Anybody with an imaginary friend should educate themselves about the whole thing, if they doubt that creative thinking about skydaddy can be used to justify ANYTHING.

btw- I include Ghandi to flesh out the list. He captured the imagination of a lot of people with that "out there" idea of pacifism. Most won't consider that so bad, unless you stop to think about it. I consider strict pacifism to be indefensible, but he made it work for him. Read Sam Harris's "End of Faith" for a much better discussion.

I'm going to respond to some spacific points that touch on the general issues I'm seeing:

Aside from the fact they all contradict each other by nature of being different religions, I shouldn't need to disprove all of them, just the one this guy believes in.

No because disproving one religion istn the same as disproving God. In fact I must say if every religion were false I sould probably shift, not to athiesm, but to a form of deism.

A miracle is when the 'impossible' is made possible through an act of a supernatural being; not just something that rarely happens.

Actually I would define a miracle as something that happens as a result of God's intervention. The event in question may or may not have been possible otherwise. For example the 10 plauges of Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea were probably natural events. The 'miracle' in this case was the timing and the fact taht Moses predicted the plauges beforehand.

And Hitler was raised in a catholic(? some brand of Jesus worship) household. There are mixed accounts as to whether he maintained his religion, but this is a major flaw in the line of thought

Hitler was raised Catholic, but by the time he got into politics he had adopted a lot of cultic-beliefs. The truth is Hitler wasnt an athiest, but he was not a Chrisian either. He was a cult leader along the lines of Charles Manson. He seemd to hold to parts of Christian belief, but rejected a lot of them and replaced them with his racist tendencies, psudo-history and bizarro interpertations.

In either case its not at all a 'flaw' in the reasoning. If Christians are to be blamed for the 'bad' thigns they've done, then athiests can be blamed for the 'bad' things they've done. My point(that a lot people seem to have missed) is that this line of argumentation is fallicious for BOTH sides. Saying athiesm is false because of Stalin, Mao, Kim ect. is just as falicious as saying Christianity is wrong because of the crucides, witch hunts ect.

After all, I'm an atheist and have not killed hundreds of people, so why is that?

And I'm a Christian who hasnt murdered hundreds of people, your point being?
I never said all athiests are mass murders(and I never will because I dont believe taht) but rather if your going to blame Christianity for the bad things some of its adherants have done, then I can blaim athiesm for the bad things it's adherants have done. However I want to reiterate this so everybody understands: I believe THAT THIS LINE OF REASONING IS FALICIOUS FOR BOTH SIDES.

Because there is no set list of "what it preaches".

No? Dont most religions have a book they consider holy, or at least to contin the basic teachings of their religion?

It can preach war when it needs to and peace when it needs to.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Generally churches support wars that they feel are justified, and condem ones they feel are not. I know some(such as Quakers) preach complete pacifism, but they do so out of a misunderstanding of the Bible.

Or two different churches can preach two conflicting ideas.

Thats when you go to their holy book to determine who is in the right.

When you tell me which one you feel is 'right',

I dont 'feel' which is right.

then there can be a discussion about it (i.e. which translation/version of the bible do you read and why, as well as what particular church you attend and why).

I cant really answer that question since I'm of the opinion that the original copies of the Bible were the 'Word of God'(although I'm not a huge fan of that phrase) and I dont believe in demonations(though for the record I go to a Methodist Church).

For instance, suppose god appeared and said "murder and rape are now ok" - would you start murdering and raping people? If you don't do those things for reasons other than religion, then it shows we can have a moral code without religion.

Truthfully the main reason I dotn rape or murder is because I have no interest in doing so, if in the absurd scenaro God told me 'Rape and murder are moral' I probably would not simply because I dont want to.

Likewise, just to clarify, are the following scenerios of "murder" wrong (and why):
1) Abortion

I have a rather odd opinoin on abortion. I believe that life doesnt begin at conception, but rather at the point where the baby's organs are fully developed and it can(in theory at least) live outside its mother. This differs from pregnency to pregnency but usually occurs around the beginning of the thrid trimester.

So abortion after the thrid trimester is a huge no-no. But before taht point is more of a grey area and probably not wrong.

2) War

Depends on the reasons for conducting the war, and, to a lesser extent, the manner in which it is conducted.

3) Self-Defense

Generally not wrong. Though I would say shooting somebody for punching you in the face probably is murder.

4) Death Penality

Depends on the person being condemned. I would say though generally no not wrong.

But wait a second, that's using the 'morals' of your religion to judge the morals of another religion, or even is some cases your own. That begins by assuming your religious morals are in fact the correct ones,

Indeed, a good point. And my point wasnt saying that IF a religion endorsed rape and murder then it has to be false, that would indeed be falicious. My point was that at least then somebody would have grounds for saying the RELIGION was immoral, as opposed to INDVIDUALS. I may have been a bit unclear in my wording there.

Though I wonder, if they did not make the religion, wouldn't the existence of aliens still violate the human-centric viewpoint of Christianity?

No I dont believe God's plan of salvation is necessarly limited to earth. Though this is probably a discussion best done somewhere else.

" If any single piece of the bible is not 100% accurate with the rest, any validity of the 'holy' book being literal is gone (I think it should be apperant as to why). Since there are different accounts of Jesus's life in the different cannons, I have disproven that particular religion is "correct". So that's a start. "

Not necessarly. The 'Bible' is not a single book at all but a collection of 66 books. Even on book were totally false that wouldnt prove the other 65 were.

And even if part of one book were false doesnt necessarly mean that the rest of it is. Really I dont know or care if the Bible is inherent. Ultimately atheists(or anybody set to disprove Christianity) have to deal with Jesus's ressurection, since that is what Christianity stands on. Period.

because if you didn't know for certain that they're correct, then you wouldn't be able to be outraged that a religion endorses murder and/or rape (which the bible does at times). Not only that, but time and again, the points raised about morality (more specifically when people 'misinterpret' the bible to read as a violent book) assumes that things like rape and murder are wrong, which I'll certainly agree on. Yet since the bible does endorse those two acts on certain occasions, you've interpretted it to be a book condemning those. This shows you're using your own sense of morality, and not that found in the book. For instance, the bible clearly states anyone working on the sabbath should be put to death, but I don't hear of people being killed en mass on sunday for working. It also states that disobident children should be stoned to death.

I'll raise this point I've raised in countless other posts. If I told you I believe in a god who I feel appeared to me and told me your entire religion (and everyone other one known to man) was wrong and that if people don't worship me and carve ice statues of my likeness you'll all go to hell, would you be quick to convert to my religion.
If you wouldn't, I'd like to know why.

I'd ask for evidence. A miracle, a prophetic prediction. I dont think that's too much to ask of a self-styled prophet.

I hope you don't use the Bible to demonstrate the Bible's authenticity. If you do not, then please speak to other Christians. Make them see the flaw in circular logic.

I dont and I dont know many Christians beyond the hyper-fundyliteralists who do either.

One cannot have it both ways. Either you get to blame atheism and religion equally for the actions of people who happen to have philosophical inclinations one way or the other, or (and this is the reasonable stance in my opinion) you hold the person accountable to their actions and do not use anyone's espoused philosophy as a scapegoat if there truly is nothing within that philosophy that condones their actions.

That's exactly my point. Thank you for agreeing with me.

I wonder if he believes in the goddess Aphrodite's miracle in which she teleported Paris back to Troy to protect him from Menelaus? Or how about the miracle in which Perseus used Medusa's head to turn Phineas to stone? What about the death and resurrection of Hercules, and his ascension to heaven?

If not, on what basis does he dismiss them? I doubt he can prove those miracles false. So why does he believe in Christianity, and not Hellenism? He seems to be exhibiting something of a double standard - saying that we aren't justified in rejecting miracles because we can't falsify them all, while at the same time he rejects all the miracles which contradict his religion, without having proven them false.

Actually my rejection of Hellenism has less to do with SPACIFIC miracle claims and more to do with the claim that the gods were responsible for every occurance of things we now know to be natural phenominin. But its probably not best to begin it here.

I have some more but I dont have time right now. Later

Anyway, I posted to Andrew's blog under my first name.

(BTW, Adam, I've been wanting to know this for a while, but do you or did you use a pseudonym for your last name? During an e-mail correspondence of ours a few years ago, the e-mails were from "Adam Marcyzk (sp?).)

Proof that the universe is eternal and/or caused itself.

I can't understand what the infiniteness of the the universe has to do with the existence of God. Would the infiniteness (in either space or time) of the universe be a proof of the God's nonexistence? Why?

Majority of physicists today (regardlessly if they are atheists or not) think that the universe is finite (in both space and time). If it is so (and it is probable according to the observations we have done until today), then the proof is simply impossible. But we can't say for sure. By that I don't mean the obvious fact that you can never be 100% sure with anything, but I want to stress that the physical laws governing the behaviour of the universe at the very beginning are difficult to find out. It is useful to look back at the history of physics. Aristotle thought that the natural state of all bodies is to lie steadily on the ground. Galilei realised that (roughly speaking) this is valid only in the environment with friction, and otherwise the bodies move on straight trajectories when any force is absent. Newton thought that relative velocity of two bodies is a subtraction their velocities, but the experiments in late 19th century shown this is not true for large velocities like that of the light and the resolution was the theory of relativity. In the fifties the neutron and proton were considered elementary particles, but experiments with higher energies prooved they must have internal structure, and so on. Always the older laws were discovered to be only an approximation of some more fundamental ones, but the difference betwwen the old and new is visible only in some previously unattested conditions. So we can say that is is with a reasonable level of confidence prooved that the universe was very compressed once upon a time, but in these conditions of extremely compressed matter one can expect that a completely new physics takes place. But all we can do today is to extrapolate our present laws that are "prooved" to be valid only in conditions we are able to create in laboratories. (This is not too exact, because we can also observe the world outside the laboratory and gain the knowledge from there, but still, events like the big bang are far from direct observation).

That's about the eternality and why I think such proof is probably impossible. The latter suggestion for proof ("that the universe is caused by itself") is even more peculiar. What does it mean "caused by itself"? I personally think the phrase is a nonsense. First, events have causes, objects don't (at least in modern meaning of the word "cause"). Second, a cause of some event is some other event preceding the former in time, by which the latter is implied. One event can not be the cause of itself - statement that the beginning of the universe was caused by the beginning of the universe says nothing. Obviously, if the history of the universe is finite, there was some first event, or, say, first cause. The theists since the times of Thomas Aquinas usually identify somewhat the first cause with the God, but I can't see any reason for that.

"It could be that matter could appear in a vacume."

Well, if this is about the big bang, it is misleading. Vacuum is an empty space (by definition). There is no vacuum outside the universe and there was no vacuum before the universe began, because the space and time are properties of the universe and there is none of them outside the universe. It is even more correct to say that phrases "before the universe began" or "outside the universe" have no meaning. It is maybe difficult to imagine, but the imagination usually doesn't work well for matters of cosmology.

"maybe Jesus's diciples stole the body."

Imagine a situation (this may be, unlike the big bang, easily imaginable) when you see an apparently death man (very ordinary man, e.g. your neighbour) put into the morgue. When you come back next day the body is away. What will you believe?

a) somebody has stolen the body

b) you have been not enough careful when investigating the body and the man hasn't been really dead

c) miracle has ocurred

Imagine also a slightly changed scenario, when there is a guard at the morgue who says he saw the dead man ascending to heaven. Will you believe

a) that the guard is insane

b) that he lies for some reason (e.g. he fell asleep and doesn't want you to realise that)

c) that he tells the truth and a miracle has ocurred?

If you don't pick the answer c) if the dead man is your neighbour, what makes the difference for Jesus?

It might be a little biased of me, but I have a hard time taking anything seriously that's posted on Myspace.

I have to agree wholeheartedly in most situations; but this is a rare case where the Myspace content in question is actually of some sort of thought-provoking variety; and attempts (albeit fails somewhat) at proper grammar and linguistics.

Chris