₦airaland Forum

Logicboy03:

striktlymi: I would have answered the question if it is vaguely related to my post...

striktlymi: Good evening Tobe,

I don't think you need bother whether anyone agrees with you or not...it is only too glaring that anyone who says there is no God is professing his/her own act of faith.

striktlymi: Why cant atheist agree that their belief/ disbelief is based on faith?

striktlymi: The Santa thingy depicts one without belief but my post shows the existence of a belief...if anyone says there is no God without an ability to prove it then there lies his/her belief, hence faith...

alfaman2: This one is for Area Boy who promised to clarify my problems with the Big Bang. And Wiegraf as well.

According to Big Bang theorists, after the initial explosion, the universe expanded at an enormous rate before decelerating. This expansion is what they termed cosmic inflation.

My question is simple. With reference to the first law of motion, what force decelerated the universe after inflation?

alfaman2: No. It is not senseless if you actually take time to comprehend it but I guess with you everything has to be explained in minute details.

alfaman2: I think we have handled this before but if you want to keep going back to it, I will just keep repeating what I said which is that being accurate in some cases does not mean being accurate in all cases.

alfaman2: No, once again. I am not providing an alternative. I am only disputing the existing theory.

alfaman2: I am insisting you test and question the theories presented to you.

alfaman2: I'm not sure I quite understand what you mean here by blind argument.

alfaman2: Anyway, about the disregarded motion law, I will put it as a question to Area Boy in my next post as he said he could clarify my worries. You are also free to answer it. Just wait.

alfaman2: Yes, I do have a problem with the method. They have a pick and chose method where they apply laws to validate their theories and disregard (or add new viariables to) these same laws when it contradicts them. That makes them irresponsible.

alfaman2: Firstly, I never said it was superior.

alfaman2: It is a criticism of occams razor by Walter Chatton. It is called the Chatton Principle and goes like this: Whenever an affirmative proposition is apt to be verified for actually existing things, if two things, howsoever they are present according to arrangement and duration, cannot suffice for the verification of the proposition while another thing is lacking, then one must posit that other thing.

And here is a good link: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/walter-chatton/#AntRaz

alfaman2: LOL. Maybe you should talk to Logicboy because I'm getting really tired of his shenanigans and I am no expert like you.

alfaman2: Stop being pedantic. It's a bit childish.

alfaman2: "We" are humans that believe that we popped out of an explosion 13.7 billion years ago.

alfaman2: Na wa for you o! Which alternative again. I don't know how this world started and unlike the big bangers and the godly, I am not going to invent something to sound relevant.

striktlymi: Now you make me suspect your ability to decipher between good and bad logic...

Can you tell us how holding a view that there is no God is not borne out of faith?

striktlymi: Good evening Tobe,

I don't think you need bother whether anyone agrees with you or not...it is only too glaring that anyone who says there is no God is professing his/her own act of faith.

alfaman2: Of course there are no good reasons to throw away existing laws of physics except when it doesn't work, which is like, ehm, ALL THE TIME! But we won't throw them away. We will rather add a variable called "dark energy" to it in order to balance the equation. Ah! yes, we don't know what this dark energy we are adding is but it is either we add it or we throw away our laws. Remeber we have invested time (thousands of years) and money (trillions of any currency) on these laws so think carefully before deciding which one you chose.

alfaman2: Back to your challenge. I have provided my reasons why I doubt the bib bang theory. I am not providing an alternative. I am just like an atheist saying, your proof of god is not sufficient for me to believe for so so reasons and the religious fanatics claiming that their proof has passed all religious test, and unless the atheist would provide a proof of another deity (or something else), he has to accept their views.

alfaman2: Can you hear how you sound? Disbelieving a theory is faith?
Stop saying thing I didn't say. I never proposed an alternative to big bang. All I'm saying is that the existing proofs are not good enough.

wiegraf: Which is, frankly, what you, not me, are suggesting we do by disregarding established, confirmed physical laws before we've thoroughly explored them.

alfaman2: No. Laws of motion become useless in extreme conditions. They are set aside and other laws are substituted. But I notice that you do agree with me that they don't work under certain conditions that have not been studied properly.

alfaman2: You are saying that we should stick to the standard laws even when the big bang theorist in attempting to explain their theory, disregarded those laws.

alfaman2: I will drop this one as I see your point. But that doesn't invalidate what I said. It may still be reasonable and logical but it was wrong.

alfaman2: You are the one that asked about Occams razor. I am surprised that you should know about occam's razor but not know of its main chief opposer. Do your research.

alfaman2: If truly the universe is made up of a unique space and matter inside a nothingness, then the potentiality of other verses exist, which automatically puts us in a multiverse. Logical and reasonable.

alfaman2: Those that now think we popped out of an explosion 13.7 billion years ago.

alfaman2: At last you are getting it.

wiegraf: On a somewhat related note, this seems to be related to your issues with the scientific method. My response on that thread stillstands

Reyginus: Lol. Actually I opened a thread, but only two atheists, kay17 and plaetton, out of the numerous intellectuals could rise to the challenge.
Don't pretend you haven't seen my signature.
I now talk to some of your kind like a father to a newborn.

alfaman2: You just sound like a religious fanatic who cannot think outside the bible because that would make his world collapse. You just can't think outside the existing "laws of physics" that govern some parts of our world. The bolded is just an extraordinary claim to make. You very well know that they exist if and only if the laws of motion were flawless and constant. We have already shown the flaws in these laws within our own world. Also note that high gravity affects these laws as to make them useless.

alfaman2: @ the bolded. Yes, perfectly reasonable but completely wrong. It is a reasonable incompetence. It is a theory that makes reasonable sense but is in reality a complete nonsense.

alfaman2: Yes, I expect them to think outside the laws and consider the possibility that those laws may not apply in such circumstances. I expect them to acknowledge that things in the cosmos may not be as simple as they think.

alfaman2: I very much understand Occam's razor but am more inclined to the school of thought of Walter Chatton which considers more possibilities where existing theories do not provide adequate answers.

alfaman2: We can discuss multiverse in another thread if you want. Let us keep this on the Big Bang. But just note that even if the big bang were to be correct, the only possible conclusion (apart from the "we are expanding into nothingness" nonsense) is that we are in a multiverse. Even if we are the only universe inside it, it is still a multiverse. A single planet solar system is still a solar system. Mind you, multiverse does not necessariry mean there was a big bang. If you want to continue this multiverse one, please open a fresh thread.

alfaman2: Humans.

alfaman2: And I don't have a poor grasp of the method. I just disagree with it.

tobechi74: Why cant atheist agree that their belief/ disbelief is based on faith?

slave mastah: *holding up the skull of old Ben, ex-head house slave*

The science of phrenology is crucial to understandin' the separation of our two species. *Picking up a hacksaw* And the skull of the African here? The area associated with submissiveness is larger than any human or any other sub-human species on planet Earth.

*Saws a piece off the back of the skull, brushes it off, and holds it up*

If you examine this piece of skull here you'll notice three distinct dimples. Here, here and here. Now, if I was holdin' the skull of an Issac Newton or a Gallileo, these three dimples would be found in the area of the skull most associated with creativity. But this is the skull of old Ben. And in the skull of old Ben, unburdened by genius, these three dimples exist in the area of the skull most associated with servility.

Heatblast: I am guessing your eyes skipped the "deeply religious" part

Area_boy: no worries mate. I do my best to explain as little as makes sense to me. alfaman is bent on twisting everything on its head

sam harris: Religion as a Source of Violence

One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the 21st century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns—about ethics, spiritual experience and the inevitability of human suffering—in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith. Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate moral communities—Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc.—and these divisions have become a continuous source of human conflict. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews versus Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians versus Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians versus Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants versus Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims versus Hindus), Sudan (Muslims versus Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims versus Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims versus Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists versus Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims versus Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite versus Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians versus Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis versus Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. In these places religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last 10 years.

In a world riven by ignorance, only the atheist refuses to deny the obvious: Religious faith promotes human violence to an astonishing degree. Religion inspires violence in at least two senses: (1) People often kill other human beings because they believe that the creator of the universe wants them to do it (the inevitable psychopathic corollary being that the act will ensure them an eternity of happiness after death). Examples of this sort of behavior are practically innumerable, jihadist suicide bombing being the most prominent. (2) Larger numbers of people are inclined toward religious conflict simply because their religion constitutes the core of their moral identities. One of the enduring pathologies of human culture is the tendency to raise children to fear and demonize other human beings on the basis of religion. Many religious conflicts that seem driven by terrestrial concerns, therefore, are religious in origin. (Just ask the Irish.)

These facts notwithstanding, religious moderates tend to imagine that human conflict is always reducible to a lack of education, to poverty or to political grievances. This is one of the many delusions of liberal piety. To dispel it, we need only reflect on the fact that the Sept. 11 hijackers were college educated and middle class and had no discernable history of political oppression. They did, however, spend an inordinate amount of time at their local mosque talking about the depravity of infidels and about the pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise. How many more architects and mechanical engineers must hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not a matter of education, poverty or politics? The truth, astonishingly enough, is this: A person can be so well educated that he can build a nuclear bomb while still believing that he will get 72 virgins in Paradise. Such is the ease with which the human mind can be partitioned by faith, and such is the degree to which our intellectual discourse still patiently accommodates religious delusion. Only the atheist has observed what should now be obvious to every thinking human being: If we want to uproot the causes of religious violence we must uproot the false certainties of religion.

Why is religion such a potent source of human violence?

Our religions are intrinsically incompatible with one another. Either Jesus rose from the dead and will be returning to Earth like a superhero or not; either the Koran is the infallible word of God or it isn’t. Every religion makes explicit claims about the way the world is, and the sheer profusion of these incompatible claims creates an enduring basis for conflict.

There is no other sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully articulate their differences from one another, or cast these differences in terms of everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavor in which us-them thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If a person really believes that calling God by the right name can spell the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers rather badly. It may even be reasonable to kill them. If a person thinks there is something that another person can say to his children that could put their souls in jeopardy for all eternity, then the heretic next door is actually far more dangerous than the child molester. The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism or politics.

Religious faith is a conversation-stopper. Religion is only area of our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand to give evidence in defense of their strongly held beliefs. And yet these beliefs often determine what they live for, what they will die for, and—all too often—what they will kill for. This is a problem, because when the stakes are high, human beings have a simple choice between conversation and violence. Only a fundamental willingness to be reasonable—to have our beliefs about the world revised by new evidence and new arguments—can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another. Certainty without evidence is necessarily divisive and dehumanizing. While there is no guarantee that rational people will always agree, the irrational are certain to be divided by their dogmas.

It seems profoundly unlikely that we will heal the divisions in our world simply by multiplying the opportunities for interfaith dialogue. The endgame for civilization cannot be mutual tolerance of patent irrationality. While all parties to liberal religious discourse have agreed to tread lightly over those points where their worldviews would otherwise collide, these very points remain perpetual sources of conflict for their coreligionists. Political correctness, therefore, does not offer an enduring basis for human cooperation. If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith.

When we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; when we have no reasons, or bad ones, we have lost our connection to the world and to one another. Atheism is nothing more than a commitment to the most basic standard of intellectual honesty: One’s convictions should be proportional to one’s evidence. Pretending to be certain when one isn’t—indeed, pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable—is both an intellectual and a moral failing. Only the atheist has realized this. The atheist is simply a person who has perceived the lies of religion and refused to make them his own.

sam harris: Faith and the Good Society

People of faith regularly claim that atheism is responsible for some of the most appalling crimes of the 20th century. Although it is true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were irreligious to varying degrees, they were not especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements were little more than litanies of delusion—delusions about race, economics, national identity, the march of history or the moral dangers of intellectualism. In many respects, religion was directly culpable even here. Consider the Holocaust: The anti-Semitism that built the Nazi crematoria brick by brick was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, religious Germans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, the religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued. (The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.)

Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless to say, a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes is none other than the problem of dogma itself—of which every religion has more than its fair share. There is no society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

While most Americans believe that getting rid of religion is an impossible goal, much of the developed world has already accomplished it. Any account of a “god gene” that causes the majority of Americans to helplessly organize their lives around ancient works of religious fiction must explain why so many inhabitants of other First World societies apparently lack such a gene. The level of atheism throughout the rest of the developed world refutes any argument that religion is somehow a moral necessity. Countries like Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on Earth. According to the United Nations’ Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate and infant mortality. Conversely, the 50 nations now ranked lowest in terms of human development are unwaveringly religious. Other analyses paint the same picture: The United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious literalism and opposition to evolutionary theory; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, STD infection and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious superstition and hostility to evolutionary theory, are especially plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms. Of course, correlational data of this sort do not resolve questions of causality—belief in God may lead to societal dysfunction; societal dysfunction may foster a belief in God; each factor may enable the other; or both may spring from some deeper source of mischief. Leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, these facts prove that atheism is perfectly compatible with the basic aspirations of a civil society; they also prove, conclusively, that religious faith does nothing to ensure a society’s health.

Countries with high levels of atheism also are the most charitable in terms of giving foreign aid to the developing world. The dubious link between Christian literalism and Christian values is also belied by other indices of charity. Consider the ratio in salaries between top-tier CEOs and their average employee: in Britain it is 24 to 1; France 15 to 1; Sweden 13 to 1; in the United States, where 83% of the population believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead, it is 475 to 1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to squeeze easily through the eye of a needle.

sam harris: The Nature of Belief

According to several recent polls, 22% of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years. Another 22% believe that he will probably do so. This is likely the same 44% who go to church once a week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews and who want to stop teaching our children about the biological fact of evolution. As President Bush is well aware, believers of this sort constitute the most cohesive and motivated segment of the American electorate. Consequently, their views and prejudices now influence almost every decision of national importance. Political liberals seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from these developments and are now thumbing Scripture, wondering how best to ingratiate themselves to the legions of men and women in our country who vote largely on the basis of religious dogma. More than 50% of Americans have a “negative” or “highly negative” view of people who do not believe in God; 70% think it important for presidential candidates to be “strongly religious.” Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—in our schools, in our courts and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28% of Americans believe in evolution; 68% believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

Although it is easy enough for smart people to criticize religious fundamentalism, something called “religious moderation” still enjoys immense prestige in our society, even in the ivory tower. This is ironic, as fundamentalists tend to make a more principled use of their brains than “moderates” do. While fundamentalists justify their religious beliefs with extraordinarily poor evidence and arguments, at least they make an attempt at rational justification. Moderates, on the other hand, generally do nothing more than cite the good consequences of religious belief. Rather than say that they believe in God because certain biblical prophecies have come true, moderates will say that they believe in God because this belief “gives their lives meaning.” When a tsunami killed a few hundred thousand people on the day after Christmas, fundamentalists readily interpreted this cataclysm as evidence of God’s wrath. As it turns out, God was sending humanity another oblique message about the evils of abortion, idolatry and homosexuality. While morally obscene, this interpretation of events is actually reasonable, given certain (ludicrous) assumptions. Moderates, on the other hand, refuse to draw any conclusions whatsoever about God from his works. God remains a perfect mystery, a mere source of consolation that is compatible with the most desolating evil. In the face of disasters like the Asian tsunami, liberal piety is apt to produce the most unctuous and stupefying nonsense imaginable. And yet, men and women of goodwill naturally prefer such vacuities to the odious moralizing and prophesizing of true believers. Between catastrophes, it is surely a virtue of liberal theology that it emphasizes mercy over wrath. It is worth noting, however, that it is human mercy on display—not God’s—when the bloated bodies of the dead are pulled from the sea. On days when thousands of children are simultaneously torn from their mothers’ arms and casually drowned, liberal theology must stand revealed for what it is—the sheerest of mortal pretenses. Even the theology of wrath has more intellectual merit. If God exists, his will is not inscrutable. The only thing inscrutable in these terrible events is that so many neurologically healthy men and women can believe the unbelievable and think this the height of moral wisdom.

It is perfectly absurd for religious moderates to suggest that a rational human being can believe in God simply because this belief makes him happy, relieves his fear of death or gives his life meaning. The absurdity becomes obvious the moment we swap the notion of God for some other consoling proposition: Imagine, for instance, that a man wants to believe that there is a diamond buried somewhere in his yard that is the size of a refrigerator. No doubt it would feel uncommonly good to believe this. Just imagine what would happen if he then followed the example of religious moderates and maintained this belief along pragmatic lines: When asked why he thinks that there is a diamond in his yard that is thousands of times larger than any yet discovered, he says things like, “This belief gives my life meaning,” or “My family and I enjoy digging for it on Sundays,” or “I wouldn’t want to live in a universe where there wasn’t a diamond buried in my backyard that is the size of a refrigerator.” Clearly these responses are inadequate. But they are worse than that. They are the responses of a madman or an idiot.

Here we can see why Pascal’s wager, Kierkegaard’s leap of faith and other epistemological Ponzi schemes won’t do. To believe that God exists is to believe that one stands in some relation to his existence such that his existence is itself the reason for one’s belief. There must be some causal connection, or an appearance thereof, between the fact in question and a person’s acceptance of it. In this way, we can see that religious beliefs, to be beliefs about the way the world is, must be as evidentiary in spirit as any other. For all their sins against reason, religious fundamentalists understand this; moderates—almost by definition—do not.

The incompatibility of reason and faith has been a self-evident feature of human cognition and public discourse for centuries. Either a person has good reasons for what he strongly believes or he does not. People of all creeds naturally recognize the primacy of reasons and resort to reasoning and evidence wherever they possibly can. When rational inquiry supports the creed it is always championed; when it poses a threat, it is derided; sometimes in the same sentence. Only when the evidence for a religious doctrine is thin or nonexistent, or there is compelling evidence against it, do its adherents invoke “faith.” Otherwise, they simply cite the reasons for their beliefs (e.g. “the New Testament confirms Old Testament prophecy,” “I saw the face of Jesus in a window,” “We prayed, and our daughter’s cancer went into remission”). Such reasons are generally inadequate, but they are better than no reasons at all. Faith is nothing more than the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail. In a world that has been shattered by mutually incompatible religious beliefs, in a nation that is growing increasingly beholden to Iron Age conceptions of God, the end of history and the immortality of the soul, this lazy partitioning of our discourse into matters of reason and matters of faith is now unconscionable.

alfaman2: You are right. I don't really know you because I am now quite sure that you are deliberately twisting my words.

You didn't even take the time to grasp my analogy before calling it flawed.

What is the difference between Adamu supposing the existence of a thief called Batuta, and scientist supposing the existence of a force called dark energy or dark matter?

alfaman2: If you understood my analogy and my previous explanations, you wouldn't have some questions you asked. So let me put my words together for you so may be able to grasp what I meant.

Big Bang Theory makes sense when used to explain certain observations but doesn't make sense when other factors are put into the equation. That is why my topic says "Doesn't Make Enough Sense". Many scientists have already found problems with this Big Bang nonsense. I cannot thus continue to accept blatant nonsense because it makes no sense. We are just inventing explanations for it to make sense. It is stark incompetence. It's incapability to answer simple questions is akin to being found out with the hand in the cookie jar. It is meaningless.

alfaman2: Although far fetched, take algebra for example. We all know that 1 + 1 = 2. But in algebra, it can equal anything you want it to. It doesn't make sense but you can't disprove it. That's what big bang is. A model that doesn't make sense but stays in the mainstream because everybody accepted the calculations.

Ok? You get it now? Despite being blatant nonsense, Big Bang helps in explaining a few things. But it is still, nonsense, like 1y + 1y = 7y.

alfaman2: For the rest of your queries, I want you to go back to my analogy and read it properly. Until the following day, everybody accepted the existence of a thief.

TroGunn: You just described what atheism is NOT. It's an illusion of knowledge. Scratch the surface of the fantastic non-God explanations for the existence of the universe and life and all you see are gaping holes and deficit thinking bordering on fraud, at variance with observable evidence.

But then counterfeit religion largely based on traditions are much worse, because unlike atheism, they lack that veneer of logic, which explains the 'plenty' conversions from counterfeit worship to atheism.

striktlymi: Good afternoon wiegraf,

Finally found my binoculars



Okay, cool!




C'mon wieg, since when has interaction prevented another from acting freely? I understand that the same argument you adopted in your attempt to show that man is not free if God is omniscient is what you want to make God subject to. But I already pointed out severally that having perfect knowledge of the future has nothing to do with interfering with the free will of anyone.

Let's use this very loose example...TBJ (the man who saw tomorrow ...I can't even hold myself from laughing) prophesied that something devastating would happen to America and all should pray on a Monday (though we know not which of the Mondays) for America in order for what he saw not to happen...He believes that God revealed what will happen if the necessary precautions are not taking...

Now the assumption is that people like me took this prophecy with a bowl of salt (as I would do any other of his prophecies)...sadly, the event he warned about took place and he might feel vindicated...but the question now is, assuming he does have the gift to see well into the future does this mean that he caused the bombing in America by just knowing about it?

Yes, I know the example is very weak and TBJ is not omnipotent and the rest of the "omnis" but the point still remains...an ability to foresee the future is not the same as an ability to determine what the future holds which in turn implies that seeing the future does not negate the free will of man in the least.



Well, Oga wieg, I believe it makes sense because unless you are able to show that interaction necessarily denies freewill, my initial comment on the matter still stands.



This is the the bit of my comment you asked me to demonstrate:



When you say man's future is determined, you mean that someone or something is responsible for the decisions man ultimately makes. Which necessarily implies that the freewill of man is tampered with...

Now, your argument for a determined future stems from our belief that God is omniscient...which implies that he knows even what will happen in our future. I have demonstrated that a future that is known does not imply that the future has been determined...the imperfect example of TBJ I gave shows this...may be not so clearly.

God is omnipresent...(I guess this is another term you would find impossible to grapple with) but it is my belief that he is everywhere which includes my past, present and future...since he has this unique ability, I see clearly how he can see a future without that future being determined...

Yes I understand why you won't see what I see...

Now coming to the evidence you requested for, the sad reality is that I can't provide you with the evidence you desire because I have one thing you seem not to have as regards this matter...FAITH!!! Omnipresence explains why the future is not determined and for any future to be determined, we need to demonstrate that the future has been manipulated by anyone or anything.

I believe this should mark the end of the discussion because it has gone out of the sphere of logic and to the realm of FAITH!!!

Hmmmm...

Really I do understand your argument and I believe as regards to pure logic without knowing any better, they make sense but I know better and that is where the difference is wieg...

cryptic: Sorry, the sun has way less than 10 billion years....It is half way through its cycle and the sun will become too hot and turn into a red hot giant; first dehydrating the earth and subsequently depriving the earth of co2, directly imparting the existence of plants...This is expected to occur about 3 to 4 billions years from now...However, this process can be slowed down by depriving the earth of Nitrogen...Nonetheless, the universe is on a course and we happen to be part of this course. Kindly note that no other celestial body will destroy the earth because the fate of the earth is tied to the sun. As regards the big bang, you were wrong to say the big bang makes no sense...The after-effects of the big bang is all around you. The cosmic microwave background radiation is a residue of the big bang...The farthest part of that explosion is traveling away from us, faster than the speed of light; about 30 billion light years away. There are deeper truths but you have to seek them...There are truths that we can only perceive if we get deeper into "the-self". The physical universe as we perceive, is just energy in different states.... Matter being frozen energy; the wave-particle-duality of matter is an attestation of this fact...However something leaves me wondering...What is the dark energy that makes up about 89% of the total amount of energy in the universe? Its very nature is unknown; it is only known to be the driver energy that pushes the furthest part of the universe away from us...I would love to hear some intelligent people discuss dark energy here.

Reyginus: Not just him. I also think the big bang theory makes little scientific sense.

alfaman2: Let me try and explain my stance on this theory, not what you think I said. Big Bang Theory is a theory (aka fabrication) that makes sense when used to explain certain observations but doesn't make sense when other factors are put into the equation. That is why my topic says "Doesn't Make Enough Sense".

alfaman2: Many scientists found problems with this Big Bang nonsense

I cannot accept blatant nonsense

I'm saying that it makes no sense

It doesn't make sense and we are inventing explanations for it to make sense.

It is stark incompetence. It is being found out with the hand in the cookie jar.

It's meaningless.

etc etc

alfaman2: All I can say is that the more you write, the more you align opinion to mine. Do you accept the theory as absolute truth? Apparently not. So you have your doubts. So do I.

alfaman2: Whether you accept it or not matters a lot in this discussion. You claim to accept its fallibility but attack me for stating same. This is just confusing from you because after many posts, I cannot with certainty say what your stance on this subject is.

alfaman2: If I didn't know you, I would say you are deliberately twisting my words.

alfaman2: This is where I completely disagree. You should read what I said previously but let me make a discussion analogy here for better comprehension.

Masa: Who took my camera?
Adamu: Batuta did it.
Masa: Who is Batuta?
Adamu: I plan to find out.
Masa: how did you know he did it if you don't know who he is?
Adamu: It is clear that your camera was taken. It is also clear that a person took it. I have called this person Batuta. It is most likely not his real name but we will use it for now until we get more information. I will allocate resources and ask all my team to concentrate on looking for Batuta and leave no stone unturned in finding this thief.
Masa: OK. Thanks
Adamu: Don't mention it. It's what we researchers do.

Two days later

Masa: Guess what, I found my camera in a bag in the wardrobe.
Adamu: Oh! Ehm!
Masa: How is the search for Batuta going? Found him yet?
Adamu: Ehm! Ehm!
Masa: Anyway, thanks for your help. Bye.
Adamu: Shyte!

I hope you understand.

The conversation could have gone much simpler, like
Masa: Who took my camera?
Adamu: I don't know.

But Adamu has a problem in accepting his ignorance so he has to invent things to explain that which he knows nothing about.

That, my dear friend is the dark energy / dark matter theory.

alfaman2: After rereading your write-up, I think you and I actually agree on a number of things. The difference is the faith we put in certain "sciences". I am very skeptical by nature and need more solid proof in order to accept certain theories, whereas you readily accept the validity of any theory that have passed a set test.

alfaman2: You have however (and I commend you for that) accepted the possibilty that the BBT may be a load of tosh as I suspect. The problem is that the mainstream scientific community does not have this view. For them, (cue ooman and co) the BBT is 100% sure solid science not open to dispute. It happenned. Full stop. This is what I'm against. My quest is for the truth, as should be the quest of any self-respecting scientist.

alfaman2: Many scientists found problems with this Big Bang nonsense

I cannot accept blatant nonsense

I'm saying that it makes no sense

It doesn't make sense and we are inventing explanations for it to make sense.

It is stark incompetence. It is being found out with the hand in the cookie jar.

It's meaningless.

etc etc

alfaman2: Please don't lecture me on dark matter because I know exactly what dark matter is. It is the scientists' answer to religion's god. It is the excuse that makes them look intelligent where a simple "I don't know", even though truthful and honourable, would have made them seem ignorant.

alfaman2: I need to answer this one separately because it is almost blasphemous to accuse me of using BB methods. I haven't created anything. I just said the idea made sense and explained why. The method I used is that of Sherlock Holmes. It is quite simple really and it goes thus: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".

striktlymi: For starters, if you hold that the future need not be determined by a conscious agent, then that leaves God out of it which sends ooman's position to the gallows.

striktlymi: Now if the future is not determined by God but by something or someone else then it implies that God has nothing to do with man's freewill because he has not determined what man will do; but rather his omniscient allows him to see man's future but powerless to change it even if he wanted to.

striktlymi: The bone of contention here is whether or not God's omniscient renders man's freewill irrelevant and I have shown that it would be impractical for God to determine man's future without making man's decision for him. I believe that God does not determine man's future and I know that omniscience has nothing to do with determining someone's future...

striktlymi: The strength of your argument really would lie in the thought that man's future is determined irrespective of who or what determines it...if this can be shown then it would be appropriate to say that man has no freewill but this would have nothing to do with God's omniscience. But the loophole in your argument is that you have not shown that the future of man is determined.

striktlymi: I have demonstrated a number of times, I think, that for us to accept that the free will of man is impaired there is a need to prove that man is coerced to take any action...that what man does has nothing to do with what he would have wanted to do if given the freedom of choice...

me: For instance, assuming you somehow had this knowledge of the future and did all you could to change it, you would fail. So would the omniscient as well actually, else he'd be wrong.

striktlymi: Let's take a computer as an example (though less than appropriate but just work with me here). Given that a computer is programmed to work in a particular order to the extent of making seemingly 'intelligent' decisions given some set parameters just as the designer wants, it can be said that the actions of this computer has been predetermined and what it does is not really making decisions but doing what the designer wants.

Now in the case of this computer, there is nothing like a freedom of choice cause there is no such thing as an infinite number of possible choices but rather what we have is a number of choices that has been hardwired into this computer by the designer. In other words, the computers choices are exactly the designers choices.

you: It is easy to see at a glance that this computer has nothing like free will, it's every action and responses are known to the designer but the trick is...the computers free will is not impaired because the designer knows what it will do but because the designer has made his own choices that of the computer.

you: Um...the answer would be YES! But you left out one small detail...we are not talking about making predictions here. Omniscience and prediction have a meeting point but they are not exactly the same.

you: Let's see if this example will help...

A child is born to a man and this man can see the future...

The man saw that his son will be admitted into LSE at age 10...

The man worked hard to get enough money to sponsor this child pending this seen future...

The child studied hard without having a clue what his future is...

The child did well in school and merited an admission into LSE...

Do we now conclude that this father manipulated the son's future by just knowing about it? If we are to accuse the man of manipulation then we need to demonstrate that this man has used his know how to influence the son's decisions and every actions leading to his admission.

you: Disagree!

Not determined!

The case of the computer is a predetermined future but that of man is not.

you: I have really! I even slept on it and still I don't think your position is right as regards this matter.