[winstonthewhiner]

Originally Posted by Mark L. Snyde, PhD

Show me anywhere else there is life except on God's green Earth.

Tricky. Our instrumentation is not yet advanced enough to thoroughly investigate our own star system, let alone others. The distance you have to travel are immense. I'd say wait a thousand years and then we discuss this again, but I am afraid you and I will be long dead by then. However, if you exclude the existence of life on a different planet, where is proof of that? Or if you want to stay in your frame of reference: if we look here: http://christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-c012.html

The Scriptures do not directly address the question of alien beings. The Bible does not explicitly confirm or deny the existence of intelligent life from other planets.

You claimed God is unsympathetic. I countered with an amazing show of love and sympathy by God for the plight of man. You couldn't stand to be shown that you are wrong, so you invent subterfuge. Nice try.

You wrote he made us, then he tortured himself to death because he couldn't stand us. You claim that makes him sympathetic. To me this looks like you conceive a child. Well, no, you don't conceive it because god didn't just conceive us, he made us. He engineered us, if you so will. Ok, it looks like you engineer your child through genetic engineering or whatever, you look at it, for some reasons you find it's hideous and because of that you kill yourself in a painful way, knowing that you won't die because you are immortal. Please show me how this makes someone sympathetic because frankly I don't see it.

God cannot be contained. It's akin to trying to express the set of real numbers on a closed interval.

The real numbers are contained in the space of complex numbers. But I digress.

You're missing the entire point here. Chickens produce chicken eggs. If you trace a chicken's ancestry back to the beginning, you arrive at the original chicken God created.

Or the original biomolecule that started procreating. But do go on.

The point is that God cannot do something that is a violation of His own existence and nature.

I can accept that. So you expand the definition of omnipotence a bit, but I can accept that concept. So by now we have a definition that allows the existence of a very mighty being. Still, the proof of existence is still open, and I will come to that later.

Contrast this with the unwavering, unchanging Word of God, perfect and complete. Sceince can be wonderful, but the moment it contradicts God's Word, it must be discarded, since it it obviously worthless.

And here we go. That's the part that bothers me most. You have something in front of your eyes that tells you what is in the bible is wrong and still you believe that the bible is right and somehow reality has got it wrong. That is the point where christian, or for that purpose, any faith becomes stupid to me. Anyway, I look here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorship_of_the_Bible

as well as the book's transmission through a human prophet.

Man is fallible. How can you be sure that your way of interpreting the bible is the right one? And if you take it at face value, how do you know that is the way it was meant to be read? And how do you even know it was written by god and not by someone who just pretended to be god, but instead was a really charismatic speaker/impostor/liar? Because if it wasn't in fact written by god, you are screwed. After all, the bibles you read are not passed down directly by a divine being and mysteriously appear in your living room, they are printed from templates which have been passed on by humans., which come from other humans who CLAIM to have been enlightened. Where is actual proof that this isn't just a giant hoax that is thousands of years old, made up by some power hungry guys who like commanding others? In contrast to god, it is proven that people with such a mentality do exist.

What it doesn't look good for are all the unsaved heathens, like yourself, who are bound for hell.

I think I covered that already.

If a man makes a ridiculous statement, I would demand proof. However, if God were to say anything ridiculous, I would not demand proof.

Usually you don't have god speaking to you. Much more often you have someone who claims to have god spoken to him/her. Which reduces the whole affair to the dinosaur example. If you think you hav god speaking to you, how do you separate it form wishful thinking?