Vel, you have NEVER put an argument in front of me. You've always quoted from the Bible. Give me some substance and I might respect your views.

It is a one way street.

I had a decent and constructive argument with Custard earlier, we disagreed but the respect was there. You and Tony have no arguments, you are right and we are wrong.

ovalman if i was preaching, i would say something like, you either believe that jesus christ died for your sins, or you will spend eternity without God.

That, you may say, is fair enough, as you don't believe in a god anyway, christians have to live by faith, they either believe in God's providential grace and mercy as represented by christ's sacrifice, or they look elsewhere for answer to life's great seemingly unanswered questions.

I do indeed respect your views, we are coming at this tv prog question from different angles which can find no common ground for agreement.
The fact is i just dont think anyone can blame god for every disaster which happens, i can look at the miracles of nature in all her glory and see intelligent design at work, whereas you adhere to the principles of a more scientific explanation...to me science and Gods creation actually go hand in hand.

his sons birthday isnt christmas day joel

ovalman. Found this from christian answers.net

who created God?
A number of skeptics ask this question. But God by definition is the uncreated creator of the universe, so the question Who created God? is illogical, just like To whom is the bachelor married?

So a more sophisticated questioner might ask: If the universe needs a cause, then why doesn't God need a cause? And if God doesn't need a cause, why should the universe need a cause? In reply, Christians should use the following reasoning:

Everything which has a beginning has a cause.1
The universe has a beginning.
Therefore the universe has a cause.
Its important to stress the words in bold type. The universe requires a cause because it had a beginning, as will be shown below. God, unlike the universe, had no beginning, so doesn't need a cause. In addition, Einstein's general relativity, which has much experimental support, shows that time is linked to matter and space. So time itself would have begun along with matter and space.


Since God, by definition, is the creator of the whole universe, he is the creator of time. Therefore He is not limited by the time dimension He created, so has no beginning in time God is the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity (Isaiah 57:15). Therefore He doesn't have a cause.

In contrast, there is good evidence that the universe had a beginning. This can be shown from the Laws of Thermodynamics, the most fundamental laws of the physical sciences.

1st Law: The total amount of mass-energy in the universe is constant.
2nd Law: The amount of energy available for work is running out, or entropy is increasing to a maximum.
If the total amount of mass-energy is limited, and the amount of usable energy is decreasing, then the universe cannot have existed forever, otherwise it would already have exhausted all usable energy the heat death of the universe. For example, all radioactive atoms would have decayed, every part of the universe would be the same temperature, and no further work would be possible.

So the obvious corollary is that the universe began a finite time ago with a lot of usable energy, and is now running down.


Now, what if the questioner accepts that the universe had a beginning, but not that it needs a cause? But it is self-evident that things that begin have a cause no-one really denies it in his heart. All science and history would collapse if this law of cause and effect were denied. So would all law enforcement, if the police didn't think they needed to find a cause for a stabbed body or a burgled house.

Also, the universe cannot be self-caused nothing can create itself, because that would mean that it existed before it came into existence, which is a logical absurdity.

IN SUMMARY
The universe (including time itself) can be shown to have had a beginning.

It is unreasonable to believe something could begin to exist without a cause.

The universe therefore requires a cause, just as Genesis 1:1 and Romans 1:20 teach.

God, as creator of time, is outside of time. Since therefore He has no beginning in time, He has always existed, so doesn't need a cause.

OBJECTIONS
There are only two ways to refute an argument:

Show that it is logically invalid

Show that at least one of the premises is false.

Is the argument valid?
A valid argument is one where it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. Note that validity does not depend on the truth of the premises, but on the form of the argument. The argument in this article is valid; it is of the same form as: All whales have backbones; Moby Dick is a whale; therefore Moby Dick has a backbone. So the only hope for the skeptic is to dispute one or both of the premises.

Are the premises true?
1. Does the universe have a beginning?

Oscillating universe ideas were popularized by atheists like the late Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov solely to avoid the notion of a beginning, with its implications of a Creator. But as shown above, the Laws of Thermodynamics undercut that argument. Even an oscillating universe cannot overcome those laws. Each one of the hypothetical cycles would exhaust more and more usable energy.

This means every cycle would be larger and longer than the previous one, so looking back in time there would be smaller and smaller cycles. So the multicycle model could have an infinite future, but can only have a finite past.2

Also, there are many lines of evidence showing that there is far too little mass for gravity to stop expansion and allow cycling in the first place, i.e., the universe is open.


According to the best estimates (even granting old-earth assumptions), the universe still has only about half the mass needed for re-contraction. This includes the combined total of both luminous matter and non-luminous matter (found in galactic halos), as well as any possible contribution of neutrinos to total mass.3

Some recent evidence for an open universe comes from the number of light-bending gravitational lenses in the sky.4 Also, analysis of Type Ia supernovae shows that the universes expansion rate is not slowing enough for a closed universe.5,6 It seems there is only 40-80% of the required matter to cause a big crunch.

Incidentally, this low mass is also a major problem for the currently fashionable inflationary version of the big bang theory, as this predicts a mass density just on the threshold of collapse a flat universe.

Finally, no known mechanism would allow a bounce back after a hypothetical big crunch.7

As the late Professor Beatrice Tinsley of Yale explained, even though the mathematics say that the universe oscillates, There is no known physical mechanism to reverse a catastrophic big crunch.

Off the paper and into the real world of physics, those models start from the Big Bang, expand, collapse, and that's the end.8

2. Denial of cause and effect

Some physicists assert that quantum mechanics violates this cause/effect principle and can produce something from nothing. For instance, Paul Davies writes:

spacetime could appear out of nothingness as a result of a quantum transition. Particles can appear out of nowhere without specific causation Yet the world of quantum mechanics routinely produces something out of nothing.9

But this is a gross misapplication of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics never produces something out of nothing. Davies himself admitted on the previous page that his scenario should not be taken too seriously.

Theories that the universe is a quantum fluctuation must presuppose that there was something to fluctuate their quantum vacuum is a lot of matter-antimatter potential not nothing.

Also, I have plenty of theoretical and practical experience at quantum mechanics (QM) from my doctoral thesis work. For example, Raman spectroscopy is a QM phenomenon, but from the wavenumber and intensity of the spectral bands, we can work out the masses of the atoms and force constants of the bonds causing the bands. To help the atheist position that the universe came into existence without a cause, one would need to find Raman bands appearing without being caused by transitions in vibrational quantum states, or alpha particles appearing without pre-existing nuclei, etc.

If QM was as acausal as some people think, then we should not assume that these phenomena have a cause. Then I may as well burn my Ph.D. thesis, and all the spectroscopy journals should quit, as should any nuclear physics research.

Also, if there is no cause, there is no explanation why this particular universe appeared at a particular time, nor why it was a universe and not, say, a banana or cat which appeared. This universe can't have any properties to explain its preferential coming into existence, because it wouldn't have any properties until it actually came into existence.

Is creation by God rational?

A last desperate tactic by skeptics to avoid a theistic conclusion is to assert that creation in time is incoherent. Davies correctly points out that since time itself began with the beginning of the universe, it is meaningless to talk about what happened before the universe began. But he claims that causes must precede their effects. So if nothing happened before the universe began, then (according to Davies) it is meaningless to discuss the cause of the universes beginning.

But the philosopher (and New Testament scholar) William Lane Craig, in a useful critique of Davies,10 pointed out that Davies is deficient in philosophical knowledge. Philosophers have long discussed the notion of simultaneous causation. Immanuel Kant (17241804) gave the example of a weight resting on a cushion simultaneously causing a depression in it. Craig says:

The first moment of time is the moment of God's creative act and of creation's simultaneous coming to be.

Some skeptics claim that all this analysis is tentative, because that is the nature of science. So this cant be used to prove creation by God. Of course, skeptics can't have it both ways: saying that the Bible is wrong because science has proved it so, but if science appears consistent with the Bible, then well, science is tentative anyway.

A final thought

The Bible informs us that time is a dimension that God created, into which man was subjected. It even tells us that one day time will no longer exist. That will be called

rude not to get the thread over 300 imo

i didnt see the programme last night but since the tsunami I have thought about it in terms of religion.

the tsunami was caused by an underground earthquake, triggered when the giant plates that make up the earth shifted.

if you believe in god, you believe god created the earth. therefore, the giant plates design was gods idea. when the great one was planning the earth, he obviously did not envisage how these plates could shift and cause destruction.

shoddy workmanship. poor planning.

either that or he just went ahead with his giant plates design regardless. maybe that was the first design he came up with and just went with that.

shoddy workmanship ,negligent or just lazy?

"thank god i survived"

idiots. if your house fell down because of an inherent flaw in its design, you wouldnt climb out of the rubble shouting "thank the architecht i survived"

it was some time, 10 or 15 mins?, between the earthquake and the giant wave hitting the shore.

god is all seeing, all powerful, and all good.

god saw the initial earthquake as he is all seeing.
god knew the destruction that was about to occur.
he knew it would be terrible as he is all good.
god could have stopped it as he is all powerful.

but he didnt. why not? was he in the bath? on the ps2 with jesus? what was more important to him at that time?

if i had 10 mins to click my fingers to save 500000 lives yet didnt.... i would be a hate figure. i would be strung up.

And what if overpopulation happens on this planet? Is it God's fault as well?

tho he tries to offset it giving people aids

If god exists then why did he make his most loyal followers into kiddie fiddlers? This god fella obviously is not in full control of his own program is he?

Also, since no one can actually communicate with the great being, then how is that a zillion years after he created the universe did he happen to drop a few thousand pages of the bible off, (twice in fact), to let us know how he felt. And in doing so, given the zillions of years to prepare the manuscript did he leave it with so many holes and contradictions in it, and why no mention of Alah, mohammed etc etc. Surely he knew of there existence and wanted to clarify his position at the earliest opportunity.

Why also does every single religious group beg for cash, and services. Surely god would have equipped his most loyal followers with some skills to avoid such perils as begging for handouts, aside from peadophillia.

On other side of the debate, we have half of the planet fighting over which version of god and or his rules we should be following. This many people cannot be wrong surely? The fact that they cannot agree is not the point is it, they all want to be right and that is really what religion is about. The more we are seen to be right, the more we can secretly break the rules right?

Simple stuff for simple peoples.

Happy new year god whoppers!

TJM, if you lift up Bulgaria, he's put his name underneath.