Thanks for the tag,
@OrangeAfroMan .
Sorry to hear the conversation’s over. Breakin’ up is hard to do…
I’ll even graciously defer from pointing out it would be impossible for you to keep up…
I’ll just address your main point — such as it is — while leaving your pointless — and baseless — allegations aside.
Quote from: OrangeAfroMan 8/20/2023, 7:43:04 PM
Is there any opinion a person could not hold, based on faith?
Can’t think of one.
That’s why I joined the convo. To concur with the derision of “religion”. As I mentioned earlier — all are false. They all have faith in the wrong things — e.g., human sacrifice, to appease some “god”. That applies to secular faith issues, as well (M2M; and seculars have their own “sacrament” — abortion on demand). As I mentioned. I find myself having to repeat myself a LOT to secular Whateverists. They have programmed, ingrained, indoctrinated patterns of thinking that are nearly impossible to work around. Hardened, narrow ideologies that are nearly impossible to penetrate.
“Faith is only as good as its object.”
That faith in that rusted old Corvair, that it’ll get you across the country? Maybe not so good.
That faith in that stripper or porn star that you’ve been dating, that she’ll remain faithful to you? Highly doubtful.
But faith in things we know to be true has value. Agreed?
Faith that the hammer you drop from a 10-story building will hit the ground? Pretty well-placed. Faith that it won’t injure anyone in the process? A little shaky.
So. What we want is truth. Is it not? So that we can put our FAITH in it?
The question, then, is: does God exist? A LOT depends on the answer to that question. Everything, in fact. All other questions — what is He like? What does He want? Why did He make all this? What are we supposed to do? —
derive from the answer to the first question.
There’s only two ways God could reveal His existence to us:
directly. Or indirectly.
Now you will deny that He’s ever revealed Himself directly. Fine.
But any reasonable person can assess His existence by indirect means. The Cosmological argument. The Teleological Argument…
Summed up: for there to be a Creation, there’s got to be a Creator. The only question is — what IS it?
Science can’t tell us. As I explained here, on a Christian facebook group, to a professed Christian who said:
//I’m with science...//
I’m with science, as well. Along with its handmaidens, reason and logic.
They can only be properly employed within the context of informed FAITH. Else they are doomed to culminate in error.
Logic says that “everything that HAS A BEGINNING must have a cause.”
Logic also states that the universe had a beginning. If it were infinitely old, it would be uniformly cold, at absolute zero. And “no further ‘work’ could be done.”
“Science” expresses this truth in the various Big Bang theories — all of which have insurmountable problems, addressed by fabricated, ad hoc solutions.
People of faith assign the CAUSE of the universe to God.
“Science” has nothing to say on this matter. Science is the systematic, analytical study of Nature — space, time, matter (that God created, wink). It has nothing to say about a “Cause” that lies outside of that Nature.
What we refer to as the secular model of “Evolution” — the idea that living microbes emerged from non-life, in a universe necessarily billions of years old, in order to accommodate this process by “natural”, uniformitarian means —
has been exposed to be scientifically invalid and logically impossible. There is not enough time or bandwidth to go into why, here. There are many excellent information ministries that can be accessed for that purpose (CMI, AIG, ICR). Simply put: even the “simplest cell” is far too complex, and requires far too many “chicken or egg” conundrums for it to have arisen by “natural”, mindless, random processes. Or to have climbed any fictitious “evolutionary ladder” (by persistently undiscovered processes) in order to arrive from microbe to microbiologist. Yet the entire M2M paradigm — including the cosmological setting in which it takes place — is nothing more than an irrational rationalization to provide an explanation of our existence that excludes that of God. Or, even more irrationally and absurdly, insists that even if God exists, it makes no difference to “scientific” observations and theories.
Perhaps even more irrationally, compromising Christians embrace this paradigm, that all of us have been conditioned and programmed to accept from infancy by the education/media/gov’t nexus. It is the “intellectual” atmosphere that we breathe. And dissent from it is not allowed.
You therefore essentially have professing Christians who are apologists for the M2M fallacy. They merely smear a thin and unconvincing “God did it that way” veneer over it.
For those with the intellectual courage to question and challenge their lifelong secular indoctrination, it quickly becomes apparent that the Biblical source of origins and history is the ONLY explanation that accords with God’s gifts of “Science”, logic, and reason.