Andrespetmonkey said:
@quote "When it comes to the origin of life, we have only two possibilities as to how life arose." That's simply not true. The best answer we can give now concerning the origin of life with any certainty is "I don't know", not Spontaneous generation or God (not to mention a personal, benevolent, omnipotent God). There are many theories floating around about the origin of life, and although as I said, we can't yet believe in one with any certainty, this does show that there are far more options than Spontaneous generation or God. Here's a list that summarizes 7 of them. @bolded I don't get this. I lack a belief in any God because of a lack of evidence. Where is faith involved? I lack a belief in Unicorns because of a lack of evidence. Does that mean I have faith that unicorns don't exist? Ofcourse not. Why doesn't the same apply to God? The burden of proof is on believers, not unbelievers. Edit: I hope this doesn't come across as hostile in any way, it's not. I know it's hard not to seem it when debating things like these. |
That wasn't entirely my point with the quote. My point was he thought that there were only 2 possibilities as to how life arose (even though I think he's correct and i'll expand on that in a bit) and even though one had been disproven (at least in his time) he would not accept the other option simply because he didn't want to believe in God. I guess I found that just rather ironic and I think stuff like that happens even today for both Christians and Athiests. As for the 2 possibilities , I think he was correct but just didn't really word it right. I think everyone here could agree that the only two possible outcomes to everything as we know it is either A.) An intelligent being created and designed it or B.) It happened randomly or by pure chance.
I know when most people think of the word "faith", they automatically associate it with religion and religion alone. This is simply not true; faith is believing in something that you cannot prove with any amount of certainty. Since there is no way to prove that there isn't a God and that everything happened by chance, believing in that is a faith step and vice versa for belief of God and since both of these are faith based decisions then the burden of proof should be on whichever side is trying to convince the other side that they are wrong. I know one could easily bring up fairytales, flying spaghetti monsters and other things much like that to show how you don't have to prove that they are not real but the comparison to something like that and the existence of God are two very different things. For something like a flying spaghetti monster, the amount of people that believe it is real are probably absolutely miniscule whilst there are millions upon millions that believe in God. Secondly (and more importantly) there isn't even a smidgen of proof that such a being exists (although God could very well have the shape of a flying spaghetti monster 
) whilst there are signs and tidbits of proof that point that God (or at the very least an intelligent being) exists.
BTW I didn't find your post to be hostile at all. I think you've been very reasonable and fair in all of your responses in this thread and I really respect that 
@ithis: That was an interesting read. I especially thought the last bit was accurate:
"Since fossils of microorganisms do not last 4 billion years, there is no direct evidence on any of these questions. That doesn't mean the hypothesis is false, it just means we don't know."
I think the bolded goes to show when it comes to this topic there is no way that either side could come even remotely come close to proving that they are right and it goes to show that all that name-calling that goes on with this type of topic is uneeded (and it's usually the irrational people that end up calling others names).
The fact that both sides has their fair share of people that think their opinions are automatically right and call people from the other side names speaks wonders.
