RJS

For freethinker

We can freely choose to accept or reject God - You have chosen to live eternally without Him and I have chosen to live eternally with Him. Free will at its finest. You are implying to the extent you believed in Hell, you would accept God, right?

I'll add one more point - to me, the genius in creating this universe where the existence or non-existence of God can't be proven, and is left up to each individual to decide and "believe" (or not believe) is awe inspiring in and of itself. And yes, I realize that you can never prove the non-existence of something.

RJS

Let me ask you (as in y'all) a question.

Do you think is more likely that life/existence is random (uncreated?) or that it was created by a higher being that decided to leave a piece of the puzzle out for us to find?

Hobbs

But, hey, it's fun, isn't it? You seem to be enjoying the sparring of opinions. I certainly lilke this sort of thing, whether about religion, politics, music, whatever. In graduate school studying philosophy, we used to go at each other for a full three hour seminar, then head accross the street for a pizza and a pitcher of beer and then argue some more.

Unfortunately, though, for you and for us, you are rather outnumbered here. So I'll say again, please do invite some of your Christian friends to join us. The more, the merrier.

Thanks for sticking around and responding like this.

Philosoft

You have no other choice. Your kids have to learn to take care of themselves and you can't magically impart that knowledge. Are you going to tell me God is constrained by the same forces as you?

<strong> Nice tactic. Emotionally poison the logical argument before it's made.

RJS

Your post alone strengthened my faith. Kinda like when I listened to the Walter Martin debate vs. Madalyn Murray.

free12thinker

You call this "Free Will at its finest", but I responded to this reply earlier by asking you if you believed that act of "allowing someone to choose A or B, but then punishing them for choosing B" is truly free will. Do we really look at free will or freedom this way in everyday life. We hardly called this freedom when we had free speech laws but censored people for saying things we did not like. Right. We hardly called this freedom when we gave blacks the right to vote, but then beat them to pieces when they exercised such rights. We supposedly have free will, yet, if we don't follow gods guidelines, we are punished. What is the difference between this and censorship or beating minorities. "Pick A or B, but if you pick B, you will go to hell." That's not Free Will.

Philosoft

Well done. Now refute it, your smugness.

RJS

No. It is way too high. But good for effect occasionally.

I agree that this is an eternal tragedy. The RC Church may be the largest offender. I think if we all went back and read the NT - we could be on the same page. But alas, I once was lost, and now am found.

David Gould

Impossible question to answer. We can make no determination on the likelihood of anything when we only have a sample of one and do not know the answer for this particular case.

If it is possible that existence is the result of randomness and if it is possible that it was created by a higher being then Occam's Razor automatically suggests we choose randomness until more information is available.

However, we do not know if it is possible that the universe is the creation of a higher being and we do not know if it is the result of randomness.

One other thing in favour of randomness is that we are pretty certain that randomness in fact exists. Who knows whether there are higher beings or not?

RJS

Nah, I'll stick with the odds. Plus, I think you might agree that a 2 billion sample is diversified enough to be reliable.