Re: Free Will & Universal connection

Wizard wrote:

> Is this Kevin, who owns property next to the Bowen Ranch?

No, I'm the one who sent you some pics recently. I don't know anything about the Kevin who owns that property but I wish I did own some there, it's a beautiful area. I would love to live in a more rural area...maybe someday.


Wizard wrote:
>I see
> you state with finite assuredness, that god has " always
> existed ". You yourself, must have been around a very long
> time, to " know " that.


I was trying to answer your question of who created the creator using the most comonly accepted definition of God as in Websters " eternal, infinite..."

I think your deduction "You yourself, must have been around a very long
time, to " know " that." questions the validaty of "historical science" and I agree that obviously none of us could have been there.

I'm sure you would agree that we all have the same physical evidence, biological evidence, and scientific facts, but it is our starting points that differ.

The universal tendency of things to run down, to fall apart, shows that the universe had to be "wound up" at the beginning. It is not eternal.

The changes we see in living things are not the sorts of changes that suggest that the living things themselves came into being by some sort of natural, evolutionary, process. Evolution from molecules to man needs some way of creating complex new genitic programs, or information. Mutations and natural selection are only ever observed to cause loss of information.

The fossils do not show the anticipated multitude of transitional forms from one basic kind of organims to another. This is powerful evidence against the belief that living things made themselves over eons of time.

Because the origin of life is almost unimaginably improable, materialist think that lots of time will help their cause. However, lots of time will not change the tendency of things to fall apart rather than come together---they will just fall apart more! Evidence that the universe is relatively "young" further contradicts that everything made itself over billions of years. For example, the erosion of the continents is such that they would have been eroded to sea level over 200 times in the suposed time they have been there.

The traditions of hundreds of indigenous peoples from around the world--stories of global Flood for example--corroborate the Bible's account of history, as does biological evidence for the closeness of all human"races".

The explosion in knowledge of the intracate workings of cells and organs has shown that such things as the blood clotting system could not have arisen by a series of small accidental changes(mutations). The instructions, or information, for specifying the complex organizations of living things is not in the molecules themselves(as it is with a crystal), but is imposed from outside. This demands a Creator whose intelligence vastly exceeds ours.

Atheists encourage the common view that science has "disproven" God by claiming that their way of thinking is "scientific". In claiming this they merely redefine science to exclude God. In fact, science began to flourish only when the Bible's view of creation took root, especially as the Reformation spread its influence. The way of thinking that enabled a scientific approach to investigating the world--that the created universe is real, consistant and understandable, for example--came from the Bible. Even non-Christian historians of science acknowledge this. Consequently, scientists who believed the Bible were involved in the development of almost every branch of science. furthermore, there are many scientists today who believe that the Bible is a totally reliable account of origins and history.

Science has given us many wonderful things: men on the moon, more food, computers, electricity, cures for diseases and so on. All these achievements involve doing experiments in the present, making infrences from these results and doing more experiments to test those infrences or ideas. Here, the infrences, and conclusions, are closely related to the experiments and there is often little room for speculation. This type of science is "process," or "operational," science, and has led to many discoveries that benifit mankind.

However, the science that deals with the past is "historical" science. Science is limited in reconstructing the past, because we cannot do experiments directly on past events, and history cannot be repeated. Here, observations made in the present are used to make inferences about the past. The experiments that are done in the present that relate to the past are quite limited, so the infrences require a lot of guesswork. The farther in the past the event being studied, the longer the chain of infrences involved, the more guesswork, and the more room there is for nonscientific factors to influence the conclusions--factors such as the religious persuasion of the scientist. So, what may be presented as "science" regarding the past may be little more that the scientist's own personal worldview.

The conflicts between "science" and "religion" occur with historical science, not operational science. Unfortunately, the respect earned by the sucess of operational science confuses many into thinking that the speculative claims of historical science carry the same authority. They don't.

With historical science, it is not the evidence in the present that is debated, so much as the infrences about the past. Scientist who believe the record of the Bible will come to diferent conclusions from thoes who are atheists and ignore the Bible. This is what lies at the root of disagreements over "historical science."