Originally Posted by The_Reclaimer

Humans often have great potential but limit themselves purposefully to those talents that only they themselves can employ. I state this truism because religion is an exercise, a talent, of imagination and of thoughtfulness in a way that is different from science itself, but is not so dissimilar to say an artisan and his craft. This is contrary to the popular atheist belief that religion is an absence or void of mind.

What then do I mean by asking for more evidence than there is?

Let us say for our purposes that you do not know anything about watches. What then could you tell me about the maker of a watch if that watch were found on a beach with no other evidence of its existence except itself? Would you be able to tell me who made it? Would you be able to tell me where it came from? Or even how it was made?

The watch naturally is a metaphor for the universe and obviously the watch maker a metaphor for God.

The problem I think atheists have is they would contest that the situation's parameters are not reality - the Universe is not a watch made by some "God".

However, I would contest that the situation is the exact same.

At first examination of this strange device washed ashore, we would give it almost magical power. It has a face that has several arms which go in circles with seeming infinite precision - never failing - the meaning of which we would not understand for quite some time.

To open it would reveal a mechanism of incredible precision and complexity which would be inconceivable to our immediate understanding.

But given time, perhaps in creating our own watches, the way we might farm the fields or tame the winds with our sailing ships, or create fire from the atoms themselves in our Nuclear Power Plants, we would slowly come to understand the nature of watch making.

And as such we could make assumptions about its origin. Because it is a watch and if we ourselves could make a watch we would easily argue that the originator must have been another like ourselves, a human, mortal, and probably after the considerable time taken to discover this fact, a creator who had long since passed away.

But the fact remains - that we can only assume who the creator was - the evidence is only circumstantial, that is to say there is an effect, and so we assume the cause.

With the Universe we are not yet to the stage of creation of anything, we take one thing and transform it into another often without human processes but other natural processes.

In that truth lies the phrase by Carl Sagan (a brilliant philosopher) that:

To create an Apple Pie you must first create the Universe.

The Universe does exist - it is our circumstantial evidence. But to the Atheist this is not enough. The mechanism of creation is not enough but he must find the creator in order to believe there is one at all.

We can argue there is a "Big Bang" or that "String Theory" and the "Braines" answers the mechanism for the creation of our universe.

But the creator will never be revealed. What created the "Braines", what caused the Big Bang to happen? And should we find a mechanism that caused that - then what caused that mechanism and so on?

And so the exercise in thoughtfulness that is religion surpasses the limitations of a scientific mind. A man who reduces himself to only believing what he has tangible evidence of is not a logical or intelligent man at all.

In court circumstantial evidence is more than enough to convict a man of the most heinous crimes including Murder and Treason (the toughest to gain a conviction).

And yet still through his arrogance the ''atheist'' proclaims that God is a figment of the imagination.

Should I present the Atheist with the watch found upon the beach, and say to him "this was created by a man" and the Atheist were to reject my faith in that assumption by saying there is not a man who exists that he has known that can create such a mechanism, then by our technological sensibilities, who is the craziest of the two of us?

So when I present that same Atheist with a single grain of sand and say "there is a God who created this grain of sand" and the Atheist says that there is no God which can create that grain of sand, who is the craziest of the two of us?

Is it the faithful for believing that our lack of ability to understand some things requires faith in many things; or is it the Atheist who believes he is so almighty that he can understand the purpose of his own self let alone that of others, and especially the purpose of something so simple and small as a single grain of sand, enough for him to argue that such an item so infinitely beyond his capability to create from nothing, should be created by nothing.