joseph1013:
A complex God can come from nothing, but a universe less complex than the God must have a creator? People who insist a god must exist definitely haven't given the whole thing much of a thought.

avaa:


This point defeats the apologists' argument.
They are like: Nothing can be without being created by something.
And I'm like: OK sir. So going by your argument, since we didn't, and couldnt have created ourselves, god must have created us? Yes?
So who the Bleep created this god?

The argument is always so tiring so I take care not to enter into it.

joseph1013:
THE MARCH OF SCIENCE

If you read popular science magazines such as Scientific American or New Scientist, you'll know there is, week-after-week, an unending stream of discoveries from all branches of science. Such is the flood of new material, it's impossible to keep completely up-to-date.

*CORRECTION*

All branches of science except one; creation science. Uniquely, this branch of science has never added to its sum total of evidence, which remains at zero.

joseph1013:
BREAKING OUR INTUITIONS

Saw a debate a short while ago about the origin of the universe and how to find out what happenes. So, permit me to rant a little.

Sometimes looking backwards can give us insight into the future. There are things we understand today that would have been incomprehensible, even absurd, to people in the past.

The idea that the Earth could be spherical was once totally counterintuitive--surely people on the underside of the Earth would fall off? It made no sense.

Another such idea is that the Earth is not supported by anything. Surely, the Earth HAS to be supported or it would fall? If we look at ancient "cosmology" we find attempts to explain this mystery. The Earth was said to be flat and supported by turtles, elephants, gods, pillars, or hanging by a thread.

Then we discovered gravity and found a mechanism that allows spherical, unsupported planets to make perfect sense. Nowadays we don't give it a second thought--the counterintuitive has become intuitive. It's hard now to imagine how a planet supported by something could ever have made sense. That idea has become so silly that even children laugh at it.

When we look around us, we find many things that were once thought intuitively impossible but are now commonplace and obvious. Take for example, the idea of sending invisible messages thousands of miles at the speed of light and even passing them through solid walls. This became possible when we discovered electromagnetic radiation and learnt how to use it. Today, the world is alight with EM radiation passing radio, TV and mobile 'phone messages around the world.

Most fundamental shifts in our understanding are brought about by discovering something we previously did not know existed, such as gravity or EM radiation.

Is it likely there are more things we have yet to discover? Definitely. For example, we know there is something we call dark matter but we have no idea what it is or where it came from--calculations just show that something exists. Maybe discovering what dark matter is will again change our perception of what is intuitive and what is counterintuitive.

Intuition is useful but we must recognise its limitations--intuition is based on the world we are familiar with and once we move beyond that world, it may let us down. That is why I shake my head when religious people insist a universe cannot create itself--it's obvious they say!

Well, it is not obvious. Our intuitions are unlikely to extend to the beginning of the universe before there was matter and before there were atoms or even electrons. We already know the world of the very tiny, the quantum world, is strange and counterintuitive and the pre-quantum world may be even stranger.

So let's leave playground philosophising behind us. The job of discovering what happened 13.7 billion years ago is not one that our fallible intuitions will help us with. It is a job for high tech particle accelerators, massive computing power, advanced mathematics and the smartest brains on the planet.

It is unlikely that partisan speculation on Nairaland will help very much.

joseph1013:
Hi friends, I don't even know if I can follow through with this and continue infinitely like I would love to do. I don't know. I only have a feeling that writing best captures what I have to say.

This page will be my questions and rant page.

I am not naive enough to expect that most who come to this page will abandon the faith they hold dear, but I do hope to convince my readers that many of us who walk away have not done so out of a rebellious, juvenile whim, but rather out of a careful weighing of the reasons for and against our former faith. Our decision, far from being "sad," as many of my friends and family perceive it, represents a move from unquestioning acceptance of tradition to a spirit of openness and adventure that pursues the evidence wherever it leads. We left in pursuit of truth.

A little about me: I grew up in a devoted Christian family loving the Lord. I was devoted and zealous. I was the 'dream' child. And because I was equally brilliant, parents pointed me as an example to their kids.

Of course as I grew up, I had questions. One of the earliest I remember was asking how Cain had a wife if there were only three people on earth (Abel having died). The answer my mum gave to that and many of the innocent questions of mine at a tender age was that I should make sure I get to heaven so that I could ask God myself. It didn't prove sufficient but what was a child to do otherwise.

I was a part of the school Christian groups. I also remember being picked by the Children Church's teachers to preach to the entire Church congregation on Children Sunday. It was awesome.

When I got to one of the foremost Federal Universities, I could not be more devoted. I was now into theological texts and got more than five translations of the Bible. I was a walking bible. Of course, there were no bible apps at that time. I consumed alot of religious materials, and read books by so many Christian authors. I also got into reading Islamic texts, mainly so I could know what I was talking about when I encountered Muslim apologists, and oh I was very successful with them.

With time, I was made a Pastor of one of the most vibrant fellowships on Campus. We did not only study the Greek and Hebrew renditions, we knew at heart copious parts of scriptures and could reel them out in our sleep. We were respected on Campus, not the least by the Christian community. We would argue scriptures and rattle you with our knowledge of the redemptive work of Christ and the concept of the New Creature.

As an Engineering student, I spent 3 of my 5 years being a Pastor of this fellowship.

It was after my NYSC that I came across certain comments in books that made me look twice and search further to see if what I had believed and devoted my time to were indeed true.

I have been on this journey for a while now and I can say that I have come to a stage where I can sufficiently say that I am longer a Christian or a religionist. I do not conclusively deny the existence of God, but I can totally say that nobody has given me a convincing evidence for the existence of the Abrahamic God.

Some have told me that I am angry with God. That cannot be true, for you cannot get angry with something you are convinced does not exist in the context that I mentioned earlier. Some have said I believed wrongly, to these folks I say they know not what they sayeth.

I invite Christian readers, as well as other God-believers to consider the possibility that my apostasy is a result not of divine or diabolical deception but of a simple weighing of the evidence ... It might be that I am wrong. It might be that I have not sought God sufficiently or studied the Bible thoroughly enough or listened carefully enough to the many Christians who have admonished me ... Maybe. But the knowledge that billions of seekers have lived and died, calling out to God for some definitive revelation without ever receiving it, or receiving revelation that conflicts with the revelation others have found, contributes to my suspicion that there is no personal God who reveals himself to anyone.

One of my primary reasons for having this page is self-serving: I do not relish knowing that others consider me to be on the road to eternal damnation if I don't repent, and I want to do what I can to change their perception of those of us who do not share their faith. Yet is this self-serving endeavour reckless? If I believed it would worsen the lives of all those who follow my rants and questions, then yes, it would be reckless. But I am convinced that life can actually improve for those who come to understand that our earthly existence is not simply a stage, a cosmic morality play, a precursor to an eternity to come. This life is the real (and only) deal.

Enjoy...

And hey, if you look at my Nairaland history, I do love Football a lot and I'm an investment buff. I'm interested in Politics too and most of all, I love adventure. I love to travel and see new places. I'm also an eclectic reader. Who says unbelievers have a boring life?

holamiday:
This comment caused a heated argument in my neighbourhood. I stumbled on it, showed it to one or two people and before i knew it, the whole place was heated up. I'd particularly like to bring to your notice the argument one particular religious friend of mine put forward to counter/answer your question. She said and i quote: 'God is all-knowing and he has given us a free will. God has given us several options to choose from and he knows the outcome of all those options but he DOES not know which option we'd choose. What to choose is left to us to decide. He only knows the ending of all options'.

Now, for the 1st time, i just got to know there are actually things God does not know.

joseph1013:
FAITH--A POST-MORTEM

Religious people believe things on faith. Although they hate to admit it, this means they are certain some things are true with insufficient evidence or with no evidence at all.

Actually, it is obvious, even to religious people, that faith is a terrible reason to accept something is true. It is terrible because we know different people use faith to arrive at contradictory conclusions. So some, or all of these conclusions MUST be wrong. For example, using faith Christians believe Jesus was a god but Muslims believe he was only a man. Using faith Jews, Christians and Muslims believe there is only one god but, using faith, Hindus believe there are many.

But there is another way to demonstrate the failure of faith that might have more resonance with religious people--there are things people believe on faith that they cannot possibly know are true. And there are things people are certain about on faith that they cannot truly be certain about. Let's look at some examples.

Muslims believe the Qur'an is perfect--that it contains no errors. I have yet to meet a Muslim who is not certain of this but how could anyone know it? No Muslim will claim to have read the entire Qur'an and confirmed every sub-clause of every sentence in every verse against validated evidence. So how do they know the Qur'an is perfect? Because someone told them and they chose to believe it on faith.

Claims of this sort cannot be shown to be true. There are many other claims that cannot be shown to be true. For example, the claim that God is omniscient. How could anyone be sure of that? They can't--they have to believe it on faith. (I don't even know how God could be sure of this--if there is something he doesn't know, he wouldn't know he doesn't know it!)

There are other religious claims for which there may be some evidence but only enough to arrive at a probability that the claim is true and not enough to arrive at certainty. Take, for example, the claim that Jesus was a real person who actually lived rather than a character of fiction.

Outside of the Bible, we have no first-hand evidence that Jesus existed. For the entire first century Jesus is not mentioned by any scholar, historian, philosopher, politician or poet. Nor is he mentioned in any surviving private letters or official documents. Absolutely nothing has been found. It's as if he didn't exist. And that is odd if he really did perform miracles, anger the Roman and Jewish establishments, attract a large following, get crucified, die and resurrect.

Even within the Bible we have no first-hand evidence. The stories about Jesus were written 30 - 90 years or so after his alleged death and no one who wrote about him could have known him (scholars do not believe the authors were Jesus' disciples--the names of the Gospels were added long after they were written). These second-hand Biblical accounts of Jesus' life are themselves problematic and need to be read with caution.

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke are largely word-for-word copies of Mark yet, despite this, contain differences of fact and paint different pictures of what Jesus was like. We also see embellishments added to the later Gospels that sound fanciful. For example, can we really believe that long dead people arose from their graves and walked around the town greeting people as stated in Matthew 27:52-53?

Given the lack of evidence for Jesus' existence and the nature of the hearsay stories in the Bible, what probability should we place on Jesus being a real historical character? Well, pick your own number, but you can only pick 100% certainty using faith--it is not warranted by the evidence.

Faith is a wholly useless way to determine what is true and what is false. So why do religious people use it? There is a simple answer to that. Faith is all they have. And it is worthless.