Well if you're going to start using a wide definition of science like that, then we can call theology a science, but won't be using the word in the same sense as the original article. Actually, theology used to be known as the queen of the sciences, so by all means, bring back the old definitions.
Why would you have to see something out of the ordinary? Christianity never claims that God's answers to prayer will be distinguishable from natural phenomena, so that is not a means of falsifying Christianity. Of course It's not a means of proving it either. And there's no guarantee that God will answer the prayer in the way in which the pay-er wants. If Jesus Christ rose from the dead, then there we have a miraculous event that stands as evidence. I believe we have that in the gospels. Christianity never claims that God will hop into a test tube on demand.
You believe it because so many others believe it. After all, how can all these people be wrong, eh?
I never said that. I never said that popularity was any reason for believing something is true. I put history and demographics forward as reasons to believe that belief in Santa and belief in Jesus Christ should not be compared because they are of a different nature. Most of your post is therefore a strawman.
Finally, people do not just start to believe in a religion. 95%+ percent, they are indoctrinated into that religion from a little kid that can't think for themselves.
That statistic is complete and utter nonsense, especially in this day and age and certainly doesn't go anyway towards explaining how grown adults with no exposure to Christianity become Christians and certainly doesn't address the issue I was discussing i.e. is belief in Santa comparable with belief in Jesus Christ.
As I said in another post: You clearly don't know much about Christianity. Justification by faith is the Christian doctrine which says that people made right before God on the basis of faith in the atoning death of Jesus Christ on the cross rather than the basis of their own meritorious actions.
Before you make snarky comments, learn the meaning of the phrases you're commenting on, otherwise you across as a glib, uneducated fool.
Just because something has been done for thousands of years does not mean it's a correct or useful thing to do.
No, but if plenty of smart people have believed it for thousands of years, it's rather glib and arrogant to assume that you can deal with all the issues and be irrefutably correct with a one sentence statement.
And he's right: justification by faith means justification without evidence, which is literally a contradiction in terms.
You clearly don't know much about Christianity. Justification by faith is the Christian doctrine which says that people made right before God on the basis of faith in the atoning death of Jesus Christ on the cross rather than the basis of their own meritorious actions.
Start to critically reflect your religious indoctrination before it's too late and before you've got too much invested in "believing" such inanities.
Again with the arrogance. I've done quite a bit of critical thinking, was never indoctrinated (my parents aren't religious) and studied physics at Oxford, so really I have no bias inf avour of being a Christian other than sincerely believing it to be true.
When they flee the country in far of their lives, I hardly think that martyrdom was high on their list of priorities. Once again, the comment is glib and shows no indication of having seriously thought through the issue.
As a side note, it seems to me that today the only near-guaranteed recipe to understand religion is to be a top-notch physicist. Any other occupation does not necessarily make it obvious.
I'm sorry, but I read Physics at Oxford and even to me that comes across as elitist. It certainly runs contrary to the Christian faith. Jesus emphasised that there was no need for great intellect to follow him and a certain degree of childlikeness was even helpful. Christianity is not simply about intellectual pondering; it is about following Christ and the bar in terms of intellect and understanding is set low. Growth and further understanding is encouraged, but the bar is still set very low because salvation is open to all.
Historians use their own form of the scientific method to evaluate the quality and authenticity of their source material AKA evidence.
No, they don't. The scientific method involves reproducing the results of experiments, making theories and testing them by performing experiments. You can't go back and rerun the Gallic Wars to find out more about Julius Caesar and there's a much different kind of interpretation involved. Unless you make the definition of science and the scientific so wide as to be meaningless, you can't say that history is scientific. Some aspects of historical research make use of science, but it is a humanity, not a science. Do you think that English Literature uses the scientific method?
Yet an adult is not convinced by that evidence because they have other data which provides a better explanation. Those same adults who can evaluate the existence of Santa critically can evaluate the identity of Jesus as the Son of God critically and come to the conclusion that it is true.
Interesting author though he may be, he is not an authority on Christianity. The gospels have far better historical credentials than the vast majority of texts from that era. If judged by any reasonable historical criteria such as date of earliest manuscripts, number of extant manuscripts, they're leagues ahead of various histories of the time. And the quote about other gospels is laughable. They were excluded precisely because they were written centuries later, didn't fit in with the established facts, and were written by known cults to further their agendas. Don't go to a sci-fi novel for hard facts about history and theology, you'll just be misinformed.
What about countries where believing in Jesus will get you killed? Quite a few people become Christians as adults in places where there are far more serious and deadly repercussions than believing in Santa. Again, your comparison is glib.
Let's be reasonable here. Firstly, the articles do deal with the basic axioms of argumentation, and, secondly, people who counter-argue criticism of blind faith with "Jesus gives me money if I lose teeth?" will likely have no use for better references anyway.
I wasn't countering a criticism of blind faith; I was countering a glib and shallow comparison. Furthermore, calling Christianity 'blind faith' is an assumption that places you within a circular argument. A cursory glance at the opening chapter of Luke (among other places) reveals that the writers of the Bible were very keen that people who have reasons to believe, evidence for their faith. The Old Testament is full of exhortations to remember what God has done. Faith is a response to the actions of God.
Also, in regard to "the difference between Santa Claus and religion is that the latter requires a much larger amount of personal work to sort it out than the former": Santa Claus may as well be a considerably more simplistic figure in comparison to [insert your favorite messiah's name here], but, nevertheless, people who believe in god's existence actually refer to the very same arguments that are used to defend Santa Claus' existence to little children.
That's an absurd claim. People don't point to historical events to prove Santa exists; they do point to the historical evidence for the crucifixion and resurrection to prove Jesus exists.
That article was appallingly unrepresentative of Christian views of God. It's one thing to read a claim about what someone believes and quite another to read/hear it first hand. If you want to argue against what Christians believe and their reasons for doing so, and this website truly represents your views, I suggest you look at what knowledgeable Christians have written on the subject, otherwise you are attacking a strawman. Get a systematic theology out of a library and read it. Take a look at Calvin's Institutes (free online) or some of the confessions of faith of major denominations. There are great sites that collect the work of scholars past and present such as monergism.com. You won't find any argument from divine hiddenness there, or any argument from desire. On the contrary, you'll find a lot about revelation, history and know-ability.
Dawkins may love the comparison between Santa and Jesus, but any examination of scholarly Christian work shows just how glib and irrelevant the comparison is.
Your issue seems to be with a god of the gaps, which the Christian God is not. I don't believe in God simply to fill in what science can't explain. I believe in a God who created the world, sustains it (primarily through 'means' such as the laws of nature), has acted in history, who will judge everyone some day and send them to hell or a new creation and who sent us son to make it possible for guilty people like me to be forgiven and enter the new creation instead of hell. I believe in a God who keeps promises, who loves, who judges, who has relationships. I don't believe in a god which is simply a placeholder for as yet undiscovered natural laws.
Incidentally, God not being bound by natural laws doesn't mean he can't act in the physical world - it just means he isn't limited in what he does and cannot be studied as a natural phenomenon. hence him being outside of the scope of science. His actions are predictable only to the extent that he has promised to do certain things and his revealed a part of his nature. It's a question of knowing someone, rather than knowing about something.
for more funny quotes, take your ridiculous post and replace 'god' with 'brother'. see if you can spot where your reasoning spectacularly failed.
Science examine natural phenomena. God is not a natural phenomena. And you suggesting that my brother is supernatural or that God is natural? Because unless they are both bound by the laws of nature or both above the laws of nature, substituting them would make no sense. If you disagree, please spell out how my reasoning has 'spectacularly failed.'
Where exactly did the original poster propose that? Straw Man. You're arguing against a position you created specifically to be easy to argue against.
It was a hyperbolic response to the tone of his post which was pretty much foaming at the mouth animosity, though there was a serious point behind it: the claim was made that it isn't ok to believe in God, so what do you do to people who do believe in God? If it isn't ok to believe in him, what are the consequences for doing so? Is it merely unacceptable in education, is it socially unacceptable, or is it so unacceptable to society that Christians should be seen as a threat and locked up? What I said was perhaps a little provocative, but there was reasonable question behind it that has serious consequences for individual religious rights.
Again, you're completely skewing the poster's original statement...
Really? The claim was made that faith in God serves the same purpose as believing in Santa and/or the Tooth Fairy. I pointed out that they do significantly different things and faith in them has significantly different consequences. It was basically a challenge to justify the original claim when it seems patently absurd. How was that skewing his position?
You know what, the more I re-read your post, the more I realize I really don't have time for this. The downright unintelligibility and illogicality of your arguments was the only reason for my previous post.
What is unintelligible about asking in what way God is similar to Santa and/or the Tooth Fairy? What is illogical about pointing out that people come to believe in God as adults, whereas they don't come to believe in Santa or the Tooth Fairy, which suggests a fundamental difference between the two, meaning that comparisons are glib and insubstantive? You've made a lot of accusation, but failed to address the issues I've raised; is that because you have no answers?
Umm, he doesn't think he is right and everyone else is wrong. You make it sounds like he stands alone in his position. The world is not full of theists, and particularly Christians. What you are doing with that is a sort of false bandwagon argument. I mean, a bandwagon argument is poor anyways, but yours is also false because the "bandwagon" isn't even necessarily holding to your view.
I can pretty confidently say that Christians don't think the Christian God is testable by science. Who can speak with authority about how Christians define their God better than Christians themselves? This isn't a question of a bandwagon, it's a question of who defines a belief: those who believe it, or those who don't.
You say that the creator is not bound by the laws that science operates in. Maybe that is somehow possible, in a theoretical sense we have no way of knowing. How do you know this?
It's one the fundamental attributes of the Christian God, as revealed in the Bible. If you want to talk about some other deity, than by all means do so, but so long as we are talking about the Christian God, this is one of his attributes, regardless of whether you believe in him or not.
You say that history, revelation, and experience are used to know about God. How do you distinguish between history and mythology?
History happened, mythology didn't, therefore there will be historical evidence to verify the events.
How do you know who's revelation to trust?
With regards to the Bible, there's a chain of reasoning that starts with evidence for the crucifixion and resurrection. If they happened, then Jesus' claims are accepted and the gospels are regarded as reliable. From there we go to the authority of the apostles to speak on God's behalf, validating the rest of the NT and also the words of Jesus in Luke 24 for instance, where he verifies that the OT is the word of God and therefore revelation to be trusted. If you're talking about subsequent 'words from God' then I become a lot more sceptical and go back to the biblical stance that all such words should be tested against scripture to see if there is any confirmation/contradiction. Ultimately, it all goes back to whether Jesus really rose from the dead and was therefore the Son of God.
Can't one person's "revelation" just be their imagination, or their own wishes, or a lie to coerce others?
Which and the Bible warns about that and suggests safeguards against it.
What do we do when some have no experience of a God
Christian belief does not require that all people have conscious experience of God, therefore it isn't a problem for the Christian faith to be true.
while others have experience of encounters with extraterrestrials?
What does ET have to do with it?
Choosing to know a God in the ways you describe leads to irreconcilable differences when people have conflicting revelations or experiences with no way to sort out their differences.
Which is why we go back to historical events for confirmation of the gospels and back to the Bible to test what others claim as revelation. There's also the matter of the Holy Spirit convicting others of the truth, so the Christian faith has mechanisms for dealing with these issues. Luke and John's gospels in particular go to great lengths to talk about evidence and reasons for believing.
Some people point to these sorts of things as the place for religion, though it has seemed better filled by philosophy and psychology and community to me.
I agree (largely). My point was simply that science is not the be all and end all when it comes to knowing things.
Anyway, thanks for a reasoned discussion with some good questions.
It's easy to post links, but takes actual thought and reasoning to engage with an argument. Belief in the Tooth Fairy and Santa was alleged to be equivalent to belief in God. Given that adults do not believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa, yet adults come to believe in God, even if they had no exposure to him in childhood, what is the basis for such an allegation? Or is it just a glib attack with no substance, as I suggested? Rather than linking to Wikipedia, why don't you point out my fallacy, or even better, engagement with the issue and bring forth your own argument.
If that is true then God has no contact with the physical world and he is irrelevant.
That's a completely illogical statement to make. God not being testable by scientific means does not mean that he has no contact with the physical world or that he is irrelevant. The relationship between me and my brother has nothing to do with science, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist or that it is irrelevant. God can't be tested or predicted by science, but he can still affect the physical world in scientifically unpredictable ways and still be immensely relevant.
If you believe that somehow the thoughts in our head caused by our neurons and synapses reach God then he must be in contact with nature somehow. If God sends his magical wishes into our world to be written down in a book then it must also be so.
Interactions with the physical world do not have to be testable or predictable in order to occur. They do have to be testable or predictable in order to be science. What scientific hypothesis do you propose we form about God? What are you going to try and learn about the laws of nature from that which is not bound by them?
If you claim that God affects our world then he must be part of nature or extend somehow into the physical world and science is the only possible successful method at discovering it.
No. Creation can be examined by science, but the creator can't because he is not bound by the laws that science operates within. History, revelation and experience are what are used to know about God.
If you reject science you reject the only possibility of ever truly finding a god.
You should read a bit abut epistemology. Or any book about knowing God. Check a good systematic theology - won't have a thing there about needing science.
You can say that your idea of a god isn't related to science but the Christian God most certainly is and it's absurdly false.
Your rather glib answers seem to bear no relation to actual scholarship and thinking about the Christian God. What makes you think you're right and everyone else is wrong?
Education is meant to EDUCATE. You inform children the trues that the human being has been able to understand until now.
I assume you mean the 'truths that mankind has so far come to understand'?
One of those trues is: The supernatural doesn't exist. There is no god or anything like that.
I see. And where has this been proved true? How exactly are you going to perform an empirical experiment on that which is not bound by the laws of nature?
If you tell them that it's ok to believe in god you are LYING TO THEM!!!
So should we start locking up all those evil people who believe in God?
Besides which, she wasn't telling them to believe in God; she was saying that science has nothing to say about God and there is no conflict there, which is quite reasonable.
You tell children about santa and all that shit. The tooth fairy.
Actually, I know quite a few Christians who don't because they don't want to lie to their kids.
That's religion for children.
No, knowing and following Jesus as personal lord and saviour would be religion for everyone, including children.
You introduce them to magical thinking, to blind faith. Than you take away that illusion, and replace it with a more horrible one that serves the same purpose.
Jesus gives me money if I lose teeth? That's a new one. Don' think Santa rose from the dead and can forgive my sin either.
Would you let a child above the age of 10 believe in Santa, The Tooth Fairy, That Mickey Mouse is real, etc?
NO.
Copying and pasting from Dawkins doesn't make you look older or smarter than you are and just means you repeat his errors. People above the age of 10 don't start believing in Santa or the Tooth Fairy. People of all ages and backgrounds start believing in Jesus. That should be a subtle clue that they're rather different. Christianity having a basis in historical events would be another.
Then teaching them that god doesn't exist is PART of public education.
Assuming you're American, I'm pretty sure that would be a violation of the Constitution.
The problem with the "public should be taught the limitations of science" model is that the limitations of science should be seen as the limitations of human knowledge.
Nonsense. Not all knowledge is scientific knowledge and not all means of discovering knowledge are scientific. This proves the point really.
Justification by evidence isn't going to work, because science will just eat it up.
Not all evidence is scientific. Are you familiar with other fields of human knowledge such as history?
Justification by faith is an oxymoron.
That's a rather glib comment that flies in the face of thousands of years of wise, intelligent and educated people advocating just such a belief and their opponents disagreeing, but not calling it an oxymoron.
It would be a combination of screen, graphics, processor, OS, software and looks. There's also something unseemly about a laptop in your living room with a monitor hanging off it; looks ugly and takes up extra space.
Slashdot Mirror
Callin someone glib is generally an indication that you think they're wrong and the rest of what I said confirmed that.
Well if you're going to start using a wide definition of science like that, then we can call theology a science, but won't be using the word in the same sense as the original article. Actually, theology used to be known as the queen of the sciences, so by all means, bring back the old definitions.
Why would you have to see something out of the ordinary? Christianity never claims that God's answers to prayer will be distinguishable from natural phenomena, so that is not a means of falsifying Christianity. Of course It's not a means of proving it either. And there's no guarantee that God will answer the prayer in the way in which the pay-er wants. If Jesus Christ rose from the dead, then there we have a miraculous event that stands as evidence. I believe we have that in the gospels. Christianity never claims that God will hop into a test tube on demand.
I never said that. I never said that popularity was any reason for believing something is true. I put history and demographics forward as reasons to believe that belief in Santa and belief in Jesus Christ should not be compared because they are of a different nature. Most of your post is therefore a strawman.
That statistic is complete and utter nonsense, especially in this day and age and certainly doesn't go anyway towards explaining how grown adults with no exposure to Christianity become Christians and certainly doesn't address the issue I was discussing i.e. is belief in Santa comparable with belief in Jesus Christ.
As I said in another post: You clearly don't know much about Christianity. Justification by faith is the Christian doctrine which says that people made right before God on the basis of faith in the atoning death of Jesus Christ on the cross rather than the basis of their own meritorious actions.
Before you make snarky comments, learn the meaning of the phrases you're commenting on, otherwise you across as a glib, uneducated fool.
No, but if plenty of smart people have believed it for thousands of years, it's rather glib and arrogant to assume that you can deal with all the issues and be irrefutably correct with a one sentence statement.
You clearly don't know much about Christianity. Justification by faith is the Christian doctrine which says that people made right before God on the basis of faith in the atoning death of Jesus Christ on the cross rather than the basis of their own meritorious actions.
What an arrogant statement.
25. You?
Again with the arrogance. I've done quite a bit of critical thinking, was never indoctrinated (my parents aren't religious) and studied physics at Oxford, so really I have no bias inf avour of being a Christian other than sincerely believing it to be true.
When they flee the country in far of their lives, I hardly think that martyrdom was high on their list of priorities. Once again, the comment is glib and shows no indication of having seriously thought through the issue.
I have a physics degree from Oxford.
I should have said that you cannot reduce a relationship to scientific statements.
I'm sorry, but I read Physics at Oxford and even to me that comes across as elitist. It certainly runs contrary to the Christian faith. Jesus emphasised that there was no need for great intellect to follow him and a certain degree of childlikeness was even helpful. Christianity is not simply about intellectual pondering; it is about following Christ and the bar in terms of intellect and understanding is set low. Growth and further understanding is encouraged, but the bar is still set very low because salvation is open to all.
No, they don't. The scientific method involves reproducing the results of experiments, making theories and testing them by performing experiments. You can't go back and rerun the Gallic Wars to find out more about Julius Caesar and there's a much different kind of interpretation involved. Unless you make the definition of science and the scientific so wide as to be meaningless, you can't say that history is scientific. Some aspects of historical research make use of science, but it is a humanity, not a science. Do you think that English Literature uses the scientific method?
Yet an adult is not convinced by that evidence because they have other data which provides a better explanation. Those same adults who can evaluate the existence of Santa critically can evaluate the identity of Jesus as the Son of God critically and come to the conclusion that it is true.
Interesting author though he may be, he is not an authority on Christianity. The gospels have far better historical credentials than the vast majority of texts from that era. If judged by any reasonable historical criteria such as date of earliest manuscripts, number of extant manuscripts, they're leagues ahead of various histories of the time. And the quote about other gospels is laughable. They were excluded precisely because they were written centuries later, didn't fit in with the established facts, and were written by known cults to further their agendas. Don't go to a sci-fi novel for hard facts about history and theology, you'll just be misinformed.
What about countries where believing in Jesus will get you killed? Quite a few people become Christians as adults in places where there are far more serious and deadly repercussions than believing in Santa. Again, your comparison is glib.
I wasn't countering a criticism of blind faith; I was countering a glib and shallow comparison. Furthermore, calling Christianity 'blind faith' is an assumption that places you within a circular argument. A cursory glance at the opening chapter of Luke (among other places) reveals that the writers of the Bible were very keen that people who have reasons to believe, evidence for their faith. The Old Testament is full of exhortations to remember what God has done. Faith is a response to the actions of God.
That's an absurd claim. People don't point to historical events to prove Santa exists; they do point to the historical evidence for the crucifixion and resurrection to prove Jesus exists.
That article was appallingly unrepresentative of Christian views of God. It's one thing to read a claim about what someone believes and quite another to read/hear it first hand. If you want to argue against what Christians believe and their reasons for doing so, and this website truly represents your views, I suggest you look at what knowledgeable Christians have written on the subject, otherwise you are attacking a strawman. Get a systematic theology out of a library and read it. Take a look at Calvin's Institutes (free online) or some of the confessions of faith of major denominations. There are great sites that collect the work of scholars past and present such as monergism.com. You won't find any argument from divine hiddenness there, or any argument from desire. On the contrary, you'll find a lot about revelation, history and know-ability.
Dawkins may love the comparison between Santa and Jesus, but any examination of scholarly Christian work shows just how glib and irrelevant the comparison is.
Your issue seems to be with a god of the gaps, which the Christian God is not. I don't believe in God simply to fill in what science can't explain. I believe in a God who created the world, sustains it (primarily through 'means' such as the laws of nature), has acted in history, who will judge everyone some day and send them to hell or a new creation and who sent us son to make it possible for guilty people like me to be forgiven and enter the new creation instead of hell. I believe in a God who keeps promises, who loves, who judges, who has relationships. I don't believe in a god which is simply a placeholder for as yet undiscovered natural laws.
Incidentally, God not being bound by natural laws doesn't mean he can't act in the physical world - it just means he isn't limited in what he does and cannot be studied as a natural phenomenon. hence him being outside of the scope of science. His actions are predictable only to the extent that he has promised to do certain things and his revealed a part of his nature. It's a question of knowing someone, rather than knowing about something.
And plenty of people critically evaluate their beliefs with a great amount of intellectual effort and still believe in God.
Science examine natural phenomena. God is not a natural phenomena. And you suggesting that my brother is supernatural or that God is natural? Because unless they are both bound by the laws of nature or both above the laws of nature, substituting them would make no sense. If you disagree, please spell out how my reasoning has 'spectacularly failed.'
It was a hyperbolic response to the tone of his post which was pretty much foaming at the mouth animosity, though there was a serious point behind it: the claim was made that it isn't ok to believe in God, so what do you do to people who do believe in God? If it isn't ok to believe in him, what are the consequences for doing so? Is it merely unacceptable in education, is it socially unacceptable, or is it so unacceptable to society that Christians should be seen as a threat and locked up? What I said was perhaps a little provocative, but there was reasonable question behind it that has serious consequences for individual religious rights.
Really? The claim was made that faith in God serves the same purpose as believing in Santa and/or the Tooth Fairy. I pointed out that they do significantly different things and faith in them has significantly different consequences. It was basically a challenge to justify the original claim when it seems patently absurd. How was that skewing his position?
What is unintelligible about asking in what way God is similar to Santa and/or the Tooth Fairy? What is illogical about pointing out that people come to believe in God as adults, whereas they don't come to believe in Santa or the Tooth Fairy, which suggests a fundamental difference between the two, meaning that comparisons are glib and insubstantive? You've made a lot of accusation, but failed to address the issues I've raised; is that because you have no answers?
I can pretty confidently say that Christians don't think the Christian God is testable by science. Who can speak with authority about how Christians define their God better than Christians themselves? This isn't a question of a bandwagon, it's a question of who defines a belief: those who believe it, or those who don't.
It's one the fundamental attributes of the Christian God, as revealed in the Bible. If you want to talk about some other deity, than by all means do so, but so long as we are talking about the Christian God, this is one of his attributes, regardless of whether you believe in him or not.
History happened, mythology didn't, therefore there will be historical evidence to verify the events.
With regards to the Bible, there's a chain of reasoning that starts with evidence for the crucifixion and resurrection. If they happened, then Jesus' claims are accepted and the gospels are regarded as reliable. From there we go to the authority of the apostles to speak on God's behalf, validating the rest of the NT and also the words of Jesus in Luke 24 for instance, where he verifies that the OT is the word of God and therefore revelation to be trusted. If you're talking about subsequent 'words from God' then I become a lot more sceptical and go back to the biblical stance that all such words should be tested against scripture to see if there is any confirmation/contradiction. Ultimately, it all goes back to whether Jesus really rose from the dead and was therefore the Son of God.
Which and the Bible warns about that and suggests safeguards against it.
Christian belief does not require that all people have conscious experience of God, therefore it isn't a problem for the Christian faith to be true.
What does ET have to do with it?
Which is why we go back to historical events for confirmation of the gospels and back to the Bible to test what others claim as revelation. There's also the matter of the Holy Spirit convicting others of the truth, so the Christian faith has mechanisms for dealing with these issues. Luke and John's gospels in particular go to great lengths to talk about evidence and reasons for believing.
I agree (largely). My point was simply that science is not the be all and end all when it comes to knowing things.
Anyway, thanks for a reasoned discussion with some good questions.
It's easy to post links, but takes actual thought and reasoning to engage with an argument. Belief in the Tooth Fairy and Santa was alleged to be equivalent to belief in God. Given that adults do not believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa, yet adults come to believe in God, even if they had no exposure to him in childhood, what is the basis for such an allegation? Or is it just a glib attack with no substance, as I suggested? Rather than linking to Wikipedia, why don't you point out my fallacy, or even better, engagement with the issue and bring forth your own argument.
That's a completely illogical statement to make. God not being testable by scientific means does not mean that he has no contact with the physical world or that he is irrelevant. The relationship between me and my brother has nothing to do with science, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist or that it is irrelevant. God can't be tested or predicted by science, but he can still affect the physical world in scientifically unpredictable ways and still be immensely relevant.
Interactions with the physical world do not have to be testable or predictable in order to occur. They do have to be testable or predictable in order to be science. What scientific hypothesis do you propose we form about God? What are you going to try and learn about the laws of nature from that which is not bound by them?
No. Creation can be examined by science, but the creator can't because he is not bound by the laws that science operates within. History, revelation and experience are what are used to know about God.
You should read a bit abut epistemology. Or any book about knowing God. Check a good systematic theology - won't have a thing there about needing science.
Your rather glib answers seem to bear no relation to actual scholarship and thinking about the Christian God. What makes you think you're right and everyone else is wrong?
I assume you mean the 'truths that mankind has so far come to understand'?
I see. And where has this been proved true? How exactly are you going to perform an empirical experiment on that which is not bound by the laws of nature?
So should we start locking up all those evil people who believe in God?
Besides which, she wasn't telling them to believe in God; she was saying that science has nothing to say about God and there is no conflict there, which is quite reasonable.
Actually, I know quite a few Christians who don't because they don't want to lie to their kids.
No, knowing and following Jesus as personal lord and saviour would be religion for everyone, including children.
Jesus gives me money if I lose teeth? That's a new one. Don' think Santa rose from the dead and can forgive my sin either.
Copying and pasting from Dawkins doesn't make you look older or smarter than you are and just means you repeat his errors. People above the age of 10 don't start believing in Santa or the Tooth Fairy. People of all ages and backgrounds start believing in Jesus. That should be a subtle clue that they're rather different. Christianity having a basis in historical events would be another.
Assuming you're American, I'm pretty sure that would be a violation of the Constitution.
Nonsense. Not all knowledge is scientific knowledge and not all means of discovering knowledge are scientific. This proves the point really.
Not all evidence is scientific. Are you familiar with other fields of human knowledge such as history?
That's a rather glib comment that flies in the face of thousands of years of wise, intelligent and educated people advocating just such a belief and their opponents disagreeing, but not calling it an oxymoron.
It would be a combination of screen, graphics, processor, OS, software and looks. There's also something unseemly about a laptop in your living room with a monitor hanging off it; looks ugly and takes up extra space.