Mister E and I continue our debate on "Life, the Universe, and Everything" with E’s latest post:
Mister E writes:
When friends of mine read the argument Adam and I have been having, the most frustrating thing they find (and Carol even said something about this) is people using bible quotes to talk about galaxies, life on other planets, and interstellar travel.
Perhaps, your friends need reading comprehension classes, as I’ve not been doing that. I’ve examined our discussions and I found two Bible quotes.
In one post, you make an argument that the Christian God is only for Earth and I respond. You then make an argument about the nature of God and I respond with scripture. You ask theological questions, you get theological answers. In one case, I use scripture to argue as to the scope of who God is and the nature of God irregardless of galaxies, life on other planets, etc.
The bible was written a very long time ago, back in a time when we thought stars were crystals not that far away, and that the sun revolved around Earth. The vastness of the universe wasn’t close to being understood for thousands of years when this special book was written.
Actually, you’re right that Astronomy was very behind the times. After the Old Testament had been finished, the Greek Astronomer Hipparchus counted around 1,000 stars for his catalogue. In the 17th Century, Keplar counted 1005.
However, does this mean the Bible was out of date on this point?
In Genesis, when God spoke to the patriarchs, He wanted to signal just how numerous the children of Israel would be. They would grow to be a mighty people of a large number. How did he communicate this largeness:
And He brought him forth outdoors and said, "Look now toward heaven and count the stars, if thou be able to number them." And He said unto him, "So shall thy seed be."-Genesis 15:7
So was God saying, "Abraham, you’ll have 1,000 descendants!" No, that wasn’t a big deal. He was say that Abraham’s seed would be uncountable.
Then in Genesis 22:17, he’s even more explicit:
in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is upon the seashore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies.
So, he compares the Stars of the Heaven to the sands by the seashore, something people would understand. On each seashore are billions upon billions of grains of sand and he compares stars to sands on the seashores.
Job 22:12 has something interesting to say about the stars:
"Is not God in the height of heaven? And behold the height of the stars, how high they are!
In saying, "How high they are?" they recognized these stars were not close by. They were very, very far away. Yes, I’m quoting up Bible verses, but you made statements about the Bible, so let’s actually quote rather than going off generalities that aren’t based on a study of it.
This is seriously stupid, and I don’t know why I’m even bothering to put down this ridiculous statement, but radio waves being sent through the amazingly vast, complicated, tumultuous, and harried topography of space would have to be a pretty damn strong to be received by us. Adam clearly hasn’t gotten the concept yet of how vast space is. We have deeply photographed and understood less than a few percent of the sky.
Not to mention the mutability of time, who knows how fast or slow time is relative to the distance between us and "them".
But even if we were to receive a radio message from a location that we would be able to calculate, such as Andromeda, all it would mean is that there is intelligent life out there. It hardly puts a dent in evolution. Our specific evolution can only be described in terms of Earth…
Maybe you should tell the government to stop wasting money on SETI, because that’s the foundational support for finding extra-terrestial life. Regarding Radio waves, Northwestern University states:
Actually, radio waves travel very quickly through space. Radio waves are a kind of electromagnetic radiation, and thus they move at the speed of light. The speed of light is a little less than 300,000 km per second. At that speed, a beam of light could go around the Earth at the equator more then 7 times in a second.
It requires no strength of equipment to be able to reach into space, ordinary ham radio operators have done it. The radio waves travel into space because it’s part of the electromagnetic spectrum and they go at the speed of life.
If we could reach a star by travelling to it at light speed for five billion years, we should have received something through the SETI Program. The only way alien civilization is at all probable is if either they developed at about the same stages as us and therefore there hasn’t been time for their signals to travel (stinks to be a sci-fi fanboy in that case.) or we’re dealing with a much younger universe than evolutionists would care to deal with.
I love it. Has Adam never turned on his television? We have a wealth of eyewitness testimony that UFOs have visited us. In fact, its much more reliable because its more modern than say, a prostitute’s testimony from 2000 years ago. Give me a break, there’s nothing there to support any of the voodoo Christianity teaches.
Actually, not really. You yourself have stated you don’t believe we’ve been visited, which means you don’t find their testimony credible, and there are reasons for that. Sane people can state, "I saw a UFO." A UFO is simply an Unidentified Flying Object. The term implies no origin. It could be a UFO which is a government aircraft but hasn’t been identified. It could be an optical allusion. When we here from people who claim to have "been on the Mothership" lack credability and few people buy it.
Also, the use of time is not really an effective argument. If we sat on a jury today and we heard a witness who was credible, if the case files were opened would that testimony be less credible for the passage of 2000 years:
JP Holding has a piece on how impossible the creation of Christianity is to explain and how it doesn’t work as a "made up" system:
tuning. The most important martyrs are those of the time of Jesus and shortly thereafter. Admittedly there are few examples of this sort of martyrdom that we may point to — records of church tradition are our only source for the martyrdoms of many of the Apostles; our best witness is actually Paul himself, who testifies that he persecuted the church with "zeal" — using a word used to describe the actions of the Maccabbeeans who killed when needed to clean things up.
But in fact we can broaden this argument further: persecution did not automatically equal martyrdom, and this is yet another reason why Christianity should not have thrived and survived. As Robin Lane Fox writes, "By reducing the history of Christian persecution to a history of legal hearings, we miss a large part of the victimization." [Fox.PagChr, 424] Beyond action by authorities, Christians could expect social ostracization if they stuck by their faith, and that is where much of the persecution Fox refers to came from - rejection by family and society, relegation to outcast status. It didn’t need to be martyrdom — it was enough that you would suffer socially and otherwise, even if still alive. DeSilva notes that those who violated the current social values (as Christians indeed did!) would find themselves subject to measures designed to shame them back into compliance — insult, reproach, physical abuse, whipping, confiscation of property, and of course disgrace — much more important in an honor-and-shame society than to us. And the NT offers ample record of such things happening [Heb. 10:32-4; 1 Pet. 2;12, 3;16, 4:12-16; Phil. 1:27-30; 1 Thess. 1:6, 2:13-14; 2 Thess. 1:4-5; Rev. 2:9-10, 13].
So it is: The Jews would dislike you, the Romans would dislike you, your family would disown you, everyone would avoid or make sport of you. Furthermore, men like Paul and Matthew, and even Peter and John, gave up lucrative trades for the sake of a mission that was all too obviously going to be nothing but trouble for them. It is quite unlikely that anyone would have gone the distance for the Christian faith at any time — unless it had something tangible behind it.
This one has been brought up many times, but it bears repeating and elaboration. If Christianity wanted to succeed, it should never have admitted that women were the first to discover the empty tomb or the first to see the Risen Jesus. It also never should have admitted that women were main supporters (Luke 8:3) or lead converts (Acts 16).
Many have pointed out that women were regarded as "bad witnesses" in the ancient world. We need to emphasize that this was not a peculiarity as it would be seen today, but an ingrained stereotype. As Malina and Neyrey note, gender in antiquity came laden with "elaborate stereotypes of what was appropriate male or female behavior." [72] Quintilian said that where murder was concerned, males are more likely to commit robbery, while females were prone to poisoning. We find such sentiments absurd and politically incorrect today — but whether they are or not, this was ingrained indelibly in the ancient mind. "In general Greek and Roman courts excluded as witnesses women, slaves, and children…According to Josephus…[women] are unacceptable because of the ‘levity and temerity of their sex’." [82] Women were so untrustworthy that they were not even allowed to be witnesses to the rising of the moon as a sign of the beginning of festivals! DeSilva also notes [33] that a woman and her words were not regarded as "public property" but should rather be guarded from strangers — women were expected to speak to and through their husbands. A woman’s place was in the home, not the witness stand, and any woman who took an independent witness was violating the honor code.
It would have been much easier to put the finding of the tomb on the male disciples (as seems to have been emphasized, based on the 1 Cor. 15 creed, though that serves a different purpose of establishing that the church’s leadership was a witness to the Risen Christ, not so much an avoidance of the female witnesses), or someone like Cleophas or even Nicodemus, find the tomb first, or to mediate the witness through Peter or John. But they were apparently stuck with this — and also apparently overcame yet another stigma…
He’s got 14 other points and concludes with this:
I propose that there is only one, broad explanation for Christianity overcoming these intolerable disadvantages, and that is that it had the ultimate rebuttal — a certain, trustworthy, and undeniable witness to the resurrection of Jesus, the only event which, in the eyes of the ancients, would have vindicated Jesus’ honor and overcome the innumerable stigmae of his life and death. It had certainty that could not be denied; in other words, enough early witnesses (as in, the 500!) with solid and indisputable testimony (no "vision of Jesus in the sky" but a tangible certainly of a physically resurrected body) and ranks of converts slightly after the fact (the thousands at Pentecost) who made it harder to not believe than to believe. Skeptics and critics must explain otherwise why, despite each and every one of these factors, Christianity survived, and thrived. A consistent witness, one that was strong enough to reach into the second century in spite of these factors, is the only reasonable candidate.
I think there’s much to be said for this. Of the 11 remaining disciples, 10 were martyred, while the other one was sorely persecuted. None renounced the faith. What are the odds? Had they stolen Christ’s body, and they knew he was not risen, they all died for something they knew to be a lie. They couldn’t simply have hallucinated the resurrection because if they went out shouting he was risen and there was a body to contradict them, it would be the end of them.
The evidence for Christianity is that certain historic truths are at the core of that faith. If Christ was not risen, the body would have been produced as evidence to that end. That it was not suggests something quite miraculous occurred.
Regarding why Jahweh can’t be the powerful multi-dimensional alien, Mister E is willing to believe in:
The basic tenants of science state that matter can not be created nor destroyed. Some other proofs that leave no room for a Christian god: Law of Thermodynamics, Entropy, Enthalpy, Newton’s laws of motion, Newton’s laws of cooling (thermodynamics), astrophysics, the existence of other religions, lack of any evidence anywhere of any divine power… the list goes on.
Entropy is quite interesting as you believe that the world moved from disorder (chaos) to order through undirected natural forces, which itelf contraditicts entropy. You also run into this little problem with evolution. if matter can neither be created or destroyed. Because at some point, you had all these bubbling gasses sitting on the Earth at the beginning of time. Where they’d come from? How did they get there? At some point, we’re left with this amazing situation where matter sits as an uncaused, supplied by nothing for no reason and came from nowhere.
The existence of other religions does not prove God wrong, incorrect, or non-existent anymore than the existence of the British disproved George Washington.
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