Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Experiments versus Experience... A Philosophy Thread

Originally Posted By curdog4570


But I was driven to Him by forces beyond my control.

I still don't know much about Him.......... but I've learned a lot about myself.

And THAT is the key to the good life.


Curdog,
This speaks volumes to me and I respect the manner in which you present your faith.

What gets to me is posters like Fireball2 who feel the need to interject God into posts that have nothing to do with God or religion.

Someone starts a thread concerning everyday aches and pains and he posts Scripture about being pain free after you die. Well no kidding you're dead.

Someone starts a thread asking where the jobs are. He suggests getting back to a Bible teaching church(I've never been in a church that didn't have a Bible). The guy asked about jobs, not religion. How does he know the original poster isn't already a student of the Bible? Kinda' presumptuous in my eyes.



I respect posters like ScottF and TLEE. Both of whom have profound faith and don't feel the need to proselytize. Their faith is evident in how they live their lives and in their posts.

"Christians" like FB2 And Ringman impress me as folks who need to push their faith on others as a means to bolster their own egos.

I think it is arrogance in it's purest form to tell someone that they're not getting to Heaven since their belief is different than theirs.

I believe in a higher power. It's something in me that's hard to express but the belief is there none the less.And the older I get and the more I learn the more profound the belief.

I'm against all supernatural believes that cause a person to make wrong decisions that are determent to themselves or others.

i do believe in a higher power....

but on taking individuals experiences as proof....problem is people can experience stuff that is very real to them but is not there.....good example is hallucinations.....i have a bad habit of doing so when i get a high fever.....at the time it is VERY phuggin real to me though after the fever is gone i realize what i went through or more usually am aware at that time what i am experiencing is not real....also went through auditory hallucinations real bad coming off a medication....

so knowing this even believing in a higher power it cant help but make one sit back and think and ask if another's experience is real or a trick of the mind....course thats why they call it faith, may never have a real answer....

No one is making you do anything. If reading what believers say about Jesus bothers you, why do you even read the thread.

Sounds to me like you are wanting discussions discussing Him to be restricted to church or Sunday school or worship groups. Are you miffed by local AM and TV stations hosting religious programs?

Curdog, old friend, glad to see you could join us tonight.

The arts of Logic and Rhetoric are largely lost upon this generation, be the practitioner Theist, Atheist, or Anti-theist. I agree that using the Bible to prove the Bible is not an effective technique. The book of Genesis is a real gift for the Anti-theist because it effectively disproves the Christian God if defined in certain way, however, it just disproves the Christian God, and does not disprove any of the other thousand creation myths.

Yes, science is about observation evidence, and predictions. , and the controlled experiment is one of it's tools.

As for non-laboratory occurrences, we don't discount them, we just want to know how you differentiate it from random chance. If prayer actually worked, we should be able to measure the difference in outcomes, be it medical, wages, crop success, marriages, etc. As an economist, I tell you it would be simple. Take a given event where we can record the number and type of people who prayed for a given outcome, collect a large enough data set, plug the numbers into a good statistics program, an see how much, and what type of prayer by folks who go to which church, how many times a year, and tithe what percent, for the result to be a long happy marriage. Not only that, if it worked, I would be one of the person's creating that data and selling it so people could invest their time and efforts in prayer and save their money. If it worked, I would convert more people the Billy Graham..

But it doesn't, and when the Pro-religious Templeton Foundation actually did a double bind study on the effect of prayer on medical patients, there was no effect, and when the patients knew they were being prayed for, the medical outcomes were actually slightly worse.

But back to your point. Most of what you call experience, is not verifiable. If Jesus came to me tomorrow in my backyard, how could I ever verify it? Unless he gave me some special piece of information with predictive power that could not have originated from this world, you couldn't. It's an extraordinary claim, I would expect you require extraordinary evidence. The problem isn't that you weren't there, it THAT I HAVE NO EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT THE CLAIM.

In contrast, if a University Professor does an experiment involving rats, I can go to the University, see the rats, talk with the 3 dozen Grad students who did all the actual work, taking all the measurements, participate in the peer review, read the published article, and see how many times the experiment has been duplicated.

The level of proof needs to be consistent with the level of the claims. If the professor is claiming he's created cold fusion with rats, it's going to take some serious convincing....

As for the conscious being a evidence for a supernatural creator being, you have to do more then just assert it. You need to provide evidence. What you call the conscious, is just a through process within the brain, and our brains are just physical matter and electrical impulses contained within our body...so how do you make the leap from a thought process to a God?

The real problem with your argument is the variations within conscious's. All you have to do is look at the member of ISIS and some of the other monsters mentioned within this thread to realize that the proposition that each person received their conscious from God is to suggest a very imperfect God.

The Christian God is unchanging?
Really?
I guess you've never compared are contrasted the Gods of the Old and New Testaments.

Originally Posted By curdog4570


But I was driven to Him by forces beyond my control.

I still don't know much about Him.......... but I've learned a lot about myself.

And THAT is the key to the good life.


Curdog,
This speaks volumes to me and I respect the manner in which you present your faith.

What gets to me is posters like Fireball2 who feel the need to interject God into posts that have nothing to do with God or religion.

Someone starts a thread concerning everyday aches and pains and he posts Scripture about being pain free after you die. Well no kidding you're dead.

Someone starts a thread asking where the jobs are. He suggests getting back to a Bible teaching church(I've never been in a church that didn't have a Bible). The guy asked about jobs, not religion. How does he know the original poster isn't already a student of the Bible? Kinda' presumptuous in my eyes.



I respect posters like ScottF and TLEE. Both of whom have profound faith and don't feel the need to proselytize. Their faith is evident in how they live their lives and in their posts.

"Christians" like FB2 And Ringman impress me as folks who need to push their faith on others as a means to bolster their own egos.

I think it is arrogance in it's purest form to tell someone that they're not getting to Heaven since their belief is different than theirs.

I believe in a higher power. It's something in me that's hard to express but the belief is there none the less.And the older I get and the more I learn the more profound the belief.

I was hoping the thread title would draw you out.

I mentioned the confusion between conscience and conscious earlier. I don't believe evolution could have produced a creature with a CONSCIENCE.

As far as prayer...... I never mentioned it. Praying ONLY for knowledge of His will for ME and the power to carry it out has served me well these past thirty years. I confess to being somewhat ambivalent as far as intercessory prayer. Too many people believe in it for me to discount it, though.

In the realm of the Supernatural, the scientific methodology is reversed in many cases. First, there is the EVENT, which was entirely unpredicted. The EVENT produced a new way of observation which led to an enlightened analysis. But.... the results of the Event are observable in the natural world.

A creature is REBORN with a new outlook and attitude toward life. THAT is what is observable.

My idea of a scientific approach to answering the question; "Is there a Creator God", would be something like this:

God either IS or he IS NOT.

A Creation WITH a Creator is more believable than a creation WITHOUT a Creator, so I'll hypothesize that there IS some sort of creative Force responsible for the creation I observe.

But, how could I test my hypothesis?

If this creative force is completely impersonal, no test comes to mind.

But..... if I'm open-minded, as any real scientist must be, I can consider the possibility of a creative force which is still very much interested and involved in his creation.

I need then only ask myself if I am WILLING to allow this force to reveal himself to me, if he does exist and has that level of interest in his creatures.

And that, my friend, is when many hit a sticking point. Their mind is not nearly as open as they liked to think.