How much evidence does it take for you to accept that something is the result of a natural process? Or are there certain phenomenon that you will never believe are natural?
Frankly, I don’t think we do.
I also believe God begins the work by which one comes to faith. He started this first by dying on teh cross to make salvation.God also has given people general revelation as well as Scripture. Then there is the Holy Spirit that convicts the world of Sin and teaches us about righteousness. All of this is grace.
I just don’t believe, that this grace is coercive. People can resist the spirit of God and refuse to cooperate.
As to Paul, he had a choice. He received great grace from God, but he also faced tremendous persecution after he became a Christian.
Most of us experience both grace as well as persecution at much smaller levels…we are not all apostles like Paul. And that’s a very important distinction between us and Paul.
It’s a foundational assumption. It’s takes a “me” to process evidence.
If all my thoughts are decided by materialistic processes such as chemical reactions, your question has a very particular answer. However if that is true, then our thought processes need not lead us to Truth.
Your fervent desire to arrive at the truth is valid only if you yourself (as a person) are beyond just material causes.
I see you are in a mix up from a scientist and on theology in this thread! My best to ya. You would think guys like u and i would have to go to work or something…actually, heading off shortly. So about resisting Gods grace…so i guess we should hold off from judging the inmer workings of the Holy Spirit when Scripture does not warrant. At the same time, i believe wise to see the fruit of armenian camps vs calvinist ones. A hyper version of armenianism may have its leaders swinging on chandeliers or w two feet into the ways of the world to try to persuade the fold into the kingdom. And a hyper calvinist may do nothing. The Biblical balance would be, as Christians, be responsible to tell others the goodnews and love people and serve people and pray really really hard for the Spirit to work in allowing the seeds planted to grow. Additionally, the balance would be to acknowledge that faith has a substance and the substance is in the Bible. This means that any professing Christian abiding by an evolutionary perspective that is quite similar to mainstream naturalism but highly different than Scriptural creationism needs to grow out of this. Faith comes from hearing and not hearing a mainstream scientific interpretation. Faith comes from hearing Gods words which include the gospel, His promises, His commands, His precepts.
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You make him sound like a real dick. But I suppose it’s really just the bible story that does that. Other people explain it away, and you embrace it.
Depends on how you define death. One way to look at death is as below -
Physical death : Seperation of one’s Spirit from the body.
Spiritual death : Seperation of one’s Spirit from God.
In Adams case, your case and mine, all of us have recieved an opportunity for redemption. God provided restitution for Adams Sin and my Sin and yours and it’s possible to come into union with God through Jesus.
All you need to do is repent.
How does that make God a dick. What is wrong on God having standards on who he hangs out/has fellowship with? And he is giving you a choice.
Eternal life with God or eternal Seperation from Him.
Glad you asked. That was a response to “If God is perfectly good, then He will administer perfect justice upon everything that misses the mark of this perfect goodness and this is exactly the sentence Adam and Eve received: death.” Death as a punishment for lack of perfection is exactly the sort of thing a real dick would do. As for the rest, substitutionary atonement is not so much dickish as insane.
If he’s giving me a choice, then he can’t have standards. Make up your mind. But it is rather dickish to give me a choice for a limited time only, before I can have the information necessary to guide that choice, while denying me the choice once I actually have access to that information.
The bible doesn’t really say that Adam was created physically immortal. The main loss for Adam was his spiritual Seperation from God.
Death in terms of Seperation from God is God’s choice.
He can have standards as well as give you a choice. That is why Jesus’ had to die on the cross and a process called sanctification and even the final ressurection is happening to believers. The idea is to both atone for past sins as well as ultimately purify believers so that they keep to God’s standards.
You don’t understand substitutionary atonement. That doesn’t make it insane.
You are assuming that the choice has to be made on perfect information. The choice is one of faiths and trust. You are not being asked to choose between hell and heaven. You are asked to choose between God and yourself. No amount of information is going to really help you on this.
Of course it is. A dick can make a choice; the question is whether he’s being a dick in doing so. And your redefinition of “death” is a common dodge, but I see no real support for it.
You have not managed to explain the apparent contradiction.
Again, substitutionary atonement is just crazy, and you have done nothing to make sense of it.
No, I’m assuming that demanding a choice based on poor information, when good information could be made available, is dickish. Disallowing a choice after information is available is also dickish.
I don’t understand this argument. If our minds are completely natural or a combination of natural and supernatural I don’t see how one is more reliable than the other. A non-materialist mind could be just as wrong and inaccurate as a natural one.
But getting back to my question, is there any evidence that would change your mind? If not, it doesn’t seem like a matter of evidence but of dogmatic belief.
It’s a matter of foundational assumptions… same thing applies to materialism as a philosophy.
So you assume that evolution can’t be true, and will not budge from position no matter the evidence?
Of course not… if there is enough evidence I would accept it…
What I am looking for a proper explanation of the mechanism and a sound probability based argument that shows its probable as per the given mechanisms.
This doesn’t exist. For all it’s claims of being an unifying theory in biology, evolution is nothing of the sort.
Other Christians have been convinced by the evidence. I don’t think it is fair to accuse them of assuming naturalism or materialism. Would you agree?
That’s easily found in population genetics. For example, the number of mutations that separate humans and chimps is well within the probability models when considering mutation rates, population sizes, and time. Is this what you are looking for?
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No… I have no hesitation in pointing out a philosophical bias among Christians as well.
No. The difference is in actual physical characteristics, behaviour etc. This is what needs to be explained, not just a change in genome sequences.
It has to be a history of the actual genetic change followed by corresponding change in the organism… and then the eff CT of selection or whatever mechanism is being proposed.
When Newton’s equations are used to calculate the trajectory of missile, the failed theorem gives a very accurate prediction of the path taken.
An accurate history with mechanisms is required.
The question of free will and God’s sovereignty is parallel to the occasioning of his special providence, and abiogenesis and evolution are connected to the subject, as well.
First of all, we shouldn’t expect to be able to get our heads around God’s infinitudes since we are finite, as I have mentioned elsewhere. That means that there may be an apparent paradox or two that we will have to live with and not hubristically insist that there is an interpretation that explains it away and that our way is the only correct way of looking at it. The question at hand is precisely that, since the Bible teaches both God’s sovereignty and our free will and responsibility.
The essence of the issue is time – the linear sequential time that we exist in and time with respect to God’s nature. He is the always Now, the eternal I AM, the forever Present tense, and our language and minds cannot encompass him.
So how does he have a dynamic relationship with us if he is absolutely sovereign and things are predetermined? You might even say predestined. Oops, ‘predetermined’ and ‘predestined’ are past tense and are not a good fit to God’s dynamic real time relationship to us.
Now I’m going to give an example of God’s special providence in the way that he most frequently uses it in his people’s lives, not breaking any natural laws. So no, @Rich_Hampton, it is not a ‘supernatural’ miracle as you insist all special providence must be, but it does involve supernatural timing and placing, per my ‘private’ definition that you take offense at. Unbelievers are just going to have to suspend disbelief and take it at face value without objecting since of course you do not believe in the immaterial God who is and is in control of ‘chance’. Some of you will have seen this before.
It is a sweet example, one among a boatload, of his sovereign, dynamic, immanent, personal and interventionist activity into my life:
So the question becomes ‘How did he do that?!’ The answer is that it is beyond our ken. Presumably you can see the parallels to free will and God’s absolute sovereignty and to abiogenesis and molecular evolution.
You say that you would be convinced of evidence, and you don’t assume naturalism or materialism. Why can’t other Christians who accept evolution hold the same position as you?
Then what are you talking about when you ask for a model based on probability? I had assumed you were talking about genetic sequences. Is this not the case?
That’s exactly what we have with humans and other ape genomes. They are a direct record of those mutational events within their lineages. We can even accurately predict the distribution of different types of substitution mutations, which I discuss in this thread:
Thanks for sharing your feelings. Maybe cool it on the language. If you have such difficulty with the God of Scripture, then what is your motive to associate with this Christian based website? To convert Christians to seculaists? To turn creationists to evolutionists? Just curious.
I’m here for the science, mostly. I would indeed like to convert creationists to evolutionists, which is indeed part of the point of the site, but I’m less sanguine about that than Joshua is.
You are here for the science? Are you kidding? You have 100s of thousands of resources outside of this measily site where u can find lots and lots and lots of science yet you park yourself and your foul mouthed critiques of the Christian faith here instead? And im curious if @swamidass true intention of this website and org is to convert creationists to evolutionists. What say you dr. Swsmidass?