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.

whether you wrote this or are quoting it then it does make a lot of sense. I am not one to believe in deities but I do believe in what I would call realism creationism as what your letter is about.

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May your moccasins trek through many happy snows, may rainbow and sunshine always be before you.

I wrote this myself more so to emphasize the absurdity of denying a creator on the basis that the universe can be explained. The universe itself can be the circumstantial evidence there is a God, there never has to be a watch maker found for the watch itself to be sufficient evidence such a man existed.

And I use the grain of sand as the counter-part to the watch because in the religious debate we often perceive the heavens as too remarkable often forgetting the fact that a single grain of sand itself is amazing.

It stems from an argument I once had with a man over the equation 2+2=4.

He argued that this is a human invention and not "truth" that there is no truth in philosophical sense. I argued that no matter what you do you cannot claim that 2+2=4 is false. He then proceeded to claim that we merely define it as 2+2=4.

So I stated that even if you said 1+1=5 (in our words) if you still have .. of something and .. of something else it equals .... of that something.

.. + .. = ....

He continued to refuse it on the basis that we apply definitions to those things ... units...

To which I said "you are simply asking for more evidence than there is".

Coming from an atheistic background (I was from about the age of 10 to the age of 18 a self-proclaimed Atheist who over those years became more and more defensive of the idea of Atheism) it was an epiphany that would later be incorporated into my rediscovering faith.

All Atheists are asking for more evidence than there is - and all Atheists are just as absurd as the man who rejects the idea that 2+2=4.

This doesn't mean I know what religion is right, but as the movie Dogma concludes "it's not about which faith is right just that you have faith".

Think of it this way. There are certain brain injuries that cause completely nonsensical logic to occur in the mind, what if all of us were equally impaired so that we could not think straight. Imagine that you just think 2+2=4 but that it actually isn't, your logic is convoluted, impaired and wrong.

I actually have personal experience of this sort, it may help my point. I got a concussion when I was a kid, around 12 years old, and when I had the trauma I could have sworn that I was turning left, while my whole body swayed to the right. My head was spinning so much, and my logic so impaired I couldn't distinguish the difference.

Another example that may help; there is a medical story of a guy who had damage to his brain, and couldn't perceive the left side of his body. He would draw self portraits of only his right half. When asked about the other side of his body, he just couldn't perceive it. it was out of his mind. To him there was no other side. Brain damage can cause some pretty screwed up things, which shows us that logic is all relative.

So what if we're all just equally impaired, and 2+2 is actually 5. We just can't think straight. Thus based on this we can conclude, there is no truth, there is only relative truth. What we perceive to be true according to our capability and outlook.

We could be incapable of understanding our own beginnings, maybe the answer to the beginnings is the real answer to 2+2, but we cannot figure it out. So many make up an all powerful being to solve the problem. The problem with that is then the question of what created this all powerful being comes up. There is always going to be the question of "Well what caused that", whether you believe in naturalism, that the universe just is as it is, or that a god created it.

Why must a person believe in something that is all powerful. Why is faith in a being we have never encountered a good thing? The idea of a god is impossible to prove or disprove, it is the funniest idea to explain everything because of that.

Are not people with faith not asking for enough evidence instead of the opposite? Someone somewhere along the line came up with the idea of god (or if you're religious god put it there) that there could be an omnipotent power in the universe. Why must the burden be on the skeptic and not the believer.

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You are not describing logic but perception which would be the effect of saying "you see 2 but really there are 3 fingers" which is actually where that whole gag "how many fingers am I holding up" comes from.

Generally because your brain's frontal and rear areas control emotion and vision.

If you have 2 of something and 2 of something else you have a total of 4 things no matter how you try to argue against it.

But here's a perplexing thought - if you could think but you could not feel, taste, smell, hear, or see...what would your existence be? What would you think about?

PS Your question "are faithful not asking for enough evidence" is wholly stupid for the same reasons that your argument that 2+2 could ever equal 5 is "stupid". That is not to say it's not a fair question or point but that you are trying to argue it is the case based upon the argument that our realities are not certain.

To which I reply to you - fly through the ceiling using only your mind and prove to me that reality is not certain by altering it.

PPS

To answer our other question faith is a good thing the same way that artistry or science or any practiced skill can be a good thing. It is an innate human talent that should be exercised for a reason we do not understand - but for no less a reason than why we practice art, which has a wholly non-useful purpose in life.

God wears a Rolex.


Jesus wears a Tag Heuer.


Satan wears a Swiss Army.

Teddy Kennedy wears a divers' Swiss Army.

2+2=4 is nowhere near the same as the belief in god. The existence of gods isn't some truth that we can prove according to our logic. The faithful are not asking for enough proof. If I said "god wears a pink polka dot shirt", you could not disprove me. If I said "there are really trillions of gods, and that they're all big fans of the Dallas Cowboys", again you could not disprove me. Obviously these are silly beliefs that I came up with, but they are not different then you saying "there is a god, now disprove it, thinking otherwise is like thinking 2+2=5".

I don't have to fly through a ceiling to prove reality is not certain. I used examples of brain damage to show that what we perceive to be reality is dependent on our viewpoint. How brain damage can fundamentally alter the way we see the world and "reality".

Laziness, hatred, greed are also an innate human characteristic. Should we also practice those at great length? Murder is a skill innate to all humans, but its a good thing most of us do not practice it. Just because we carry an innate tendency to do it, does not make it a good thing. Many things we are hardwired with are considered to be morally wrong.

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I see the real problem here, I think. You think that atheism, or just lack of Faith, is enough to make all of life meaningless. However, there is more meaning, and I think this is why religion among western countries is declining, within unbelief.

You could believe that a god conjured up everything. To me that is boring. It says we really don't have choice, and the universe is simple (it is the whim of one mind).

If you reject gods, then you are in a phantasmagoric universe. Time, space, dimension, are like liquid. The conceptions of the finite fight the infinite. The small is confounding and the large is overwhelming. Awe is reflected in the starry backdrop of the heavens. Awe is reflected in the vast subsistence of life. There are no answers. There are no guides. It is in your mind that you grope for understanding. Nothing is given to you, helping you find purpose. You find the purpose of an individual. Taken by reason. At the same time you never let your presumptions take over your rational, and lead you to falseness: you do not claim to know more than you really do.

Lemmie get simple on ya here...
...The Bible dictates that the world is only 6,000 years old. Alot of people have a problem with that.
What do you think?

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Hell is the impossibility of reason.

Where does the Bible say that?