If you think there's evidence, then you're not talking about the same issue Arok and I are talking about, namely faith and reason. If you think there's evidence, then you're not having faith.

I have not said there is no evidence. The Bible, for instance, is evidence. And if you're going to just reply that the Bible is fiction, tell it to someone who will confirm your sense of self-worth, because I don't want to hear it from you.

No. But I WILL keep in mind that people of all sorts of religions think their prayers are answered, and some people think their "magick spells" work, and so on. Unless you can demonstrate that God is actually in fact answering prayers, something which nobody's done, coincidentally, I'm not going to accept your "I prayed and it happened!" as evidence of a god, much less YOUR god, of course.

Nobody has measured the answering of prayers on a logorithmic scale or something that would make you wet your pants in belief, but prayers are answered, and believers do find satisfaction and support. And if you claim coincidence, I remind you that however often something happens, it could still be coincidence. "Oh, what a surprise, my foot moved when I asked it to! What a coincidence!" You say medical science shows how that happens, and I can respond that it's still a coincidence. Everything you believe is still based on probability, and when those things are shown to be incorrectly predicted, scientists race off to understand how they were wrong. Some scientific theories are just one way of understanding something that could be understood other ways. Gravity, for instance, has been understood by people before as the will of a god holding us down. Their proof was the same as yours, you just believe in a different cause, which could one day be proven wrong. What if we drilled to the center of a planet and discovered a device generating a gravitational pull, not that the planet's core was or the orbit was. Your theory would be wrong. Everything you believe could be coincidental, as you mgiht say of a prayer being answered. You choose to believe they are not coincidences, and for reasons other people may choose to deny the same way you choose to deny prayers and God.

There are numerous old ways of understanding things, such as the Golden Rule of geometry, or Pie, which are not exact, and very likely will be bested by science in the future. Yet you still use them, knowing they are not right, just closer to the "truth". All of science could be seen in that manner by a believer, if they desired. Maybe it works for survival in this world, but it's not the whole truth. Unless a believer sees God as solely a prime mover, they know that things continue to happen because God allows the world to continue. Were he to choose to stop it, the world, and all the scientific ways of viewing it, would cease to be.

How so? I don't believe anything without evidence... and yet, my life isn't sad. Life isn't about "things and forces you can't understand or control", and I don't know where you got the idea. It's about whatever you want it to be about.

Having that sort of self-centered belief is a problem. So long as you don't think so, there's no reason for you to find anything else, like religion. You're too proud of yourself to think about anything else.

Science can't say that Undetectable Gremlins of Car Failure responsible for all car failures don't exist.

Depends on what you call running out of oil. In your world, the car won't function because it's run out of oil. The point of faith is that the oil of things isn't necessarily corporeal.

You don't assume something's true until it's disproven. That makes you sense--you can't prove an existential negative, anyway. You can't disprove those gremlins, or Santa. What IS reasonable is NOT assuming something is true until it's evidenced.

The point is you're still talking physical proof. You want to see God and be told to believe in him. You won't get that opportunity, unless someone upstairs takes pity on you in a Doubting Thomas sort of way. Even if it did happen, you'd probably simply say it was some sort of illusion caused by a projector of some sort.

If you base all your actions and thoughts on what you can directly perceive, there's no way to accept anything supernatural.

Science can't say that you're wrong because "there is a god" is not a testable hypothesis. It's not a scientific concept. But you can and should apply *reason* to figuring out if it's true.

You believe it's reasonable to say there is no God or gods. Believers see that as totally unreasonable, for a variety of reasons you fail to recognize, or see as coincidental or childish. For instance, some people see existence itself as reason enough to believe in God. You prefer to believe in a huge coincidence in the universe. You see that believe as superior, and are happy with that assumption.

Pride is one of the strongest weapons of the Devil.
Laugh as you will.


Arok Manok - Ex-admin Extraordinaire
Future Post-Apocalypse Warlord



I'd rather be throwing a frisbee right now