Posted on 02/24/2012 10:12:20 AM PST by SeekAndFind
He is regarded as the most famous atheist in the world but last night Professor Richard Dawkins admitted he could not be sure that God does not exist.
He told the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, that he preferred to call himself an agnostic rather than an atheist. The two men were taking part in a public “dialogue” at Oxford University at the end of a week which has seen bitter debate about the role of religion in public life in Britain. Last week Baroness Warsi, the Tory party chairman, warned of a tide of “militant secularism” challenging the religious foundations of British society. The discussion, in Sir Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre, attracted attention from around the world. As well as being relayed to two other theatres, it was streamed live on the internet and promoted fierce debate on the Twitter social network.
For an hour and 20 minutes the two men politely discussed "The nature of human beings and the question of their ultimate origin" touching on the meaning of consciousness, the evolution of human language – and Dr Williams’s beard.
For much of the discussion the Archbishop sat quietly listening to Prof Dawkins’s explanations of human evolution.
At one point he told the professor that he was “inspired” by “elegance” of the professor’s explanation for the origins of life – and agreed with much of it. Prof Dawkins told him: “What I can’t understand is why you can’t see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing – that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?”
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
If the third human on this planet DIDn’T come from two other ones..
WELL THEN.. you are forced to concoct/make up/compose a BIG Yarn.. a Story.. a Tale.. to explain it..
Dawkins is quite good at it.. call it Science Fiction.. or Creative Factoids.. or Academic Fund Raisers..
Fiction must believe believable else whats the point...
Reality need not BE logical at all to humans..
What is.... IS... and What ain’t..... AIN’T..
Where did the third human come from?..
Aha! Exactly! And there you've swerved into the truth of it.
You *can't* reach a decision. You must have faith.
Whether it is the Christian in the pew or whether it is the scientist formulating a hypothesis, it all begins with "I believe". Once you believe, once you commit to an option and see where it goes, you can move forward. You can investigate. You can discover and learn.
Without faith, the world stops at the end of your own nose.
Pray for him. It’s the Judeo/Christian thing to do.
But, somebody had to cook the soup!
Faith determines belief in God. It is true that there can really only be agnostics without faith-—either in a God or in no God. Both take faith.
Dawkins is finally being honest— Atheism actually takes more faith than a belief in a Designer.
Prove to me that Leprechauns do not exist, and then I’ll be happy to prove that God doesn’t exist.
Are you a monkey? Wanna see a monkey? Go look in the mirror, you’ll see a monkey. Great ape, actually, the hairless ape.
That’s because everything requires a leap of faith.
Can you really prove your spouse loves you? No.
Can you really prove this all isn’t an illusion? No.
Can you really prove you are even alive? No.
Our whole lives are powered by little leaps of faith. To refuse to do so is to refuse to exist.
But it sure requires a leap of faith to me to believe that the universe "just happened".
Belief in God is in our DNA. We were created to worship Him. However, He has given each of us a free will. God gives us the choice to accept Him or reject Him.
For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God. Romans 1:19-21
I don't care about proving either.OK.But it sure requires a leap of faith to me to believe that the universe "just happened".
One of the problems I have with theism is the argument that nothing can exist without being created, so therefore there must be a God, who wasn't created, who created everything else.
"One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason-but one cannot have both." -"Dr. Hartley Baldwin" in Robert Heinlein's Friday
"About a thousand genes are shared by every organism, however simple or complicated. Although their common ancestor must have lived more than a billion years ago, their shared structure can still be glimpsed. It shows how the grand plan of life has been modified through the course of evolution."
From "Darwin's Ghost" (page 284) by Steve Jones ... a modern update to Darwin's work ... exact same chapter titles.
There doesn't seem to me to be any other argument for why the universe exists other than it "just happened".
I see the law of cause of effect in operation all around me. "Just happened", especially on such a grand scale, just doesn't cut it for me.
If I understand your question correctly, you're asking, "Why, through several millenia of human history, did Christ come to earth only 2,000 years ago?"
It could quite easily be argued that history had to be "ripe" enough to ensure Christianity became available to all of humanity. If you look at the belief systems that grew up prior to the time of Christ (i.e. Hinduism, Buddhism, various animist/pagan religions, etc.) they have either died out, or remain relegated to very specific regions. Only the infrastructure and communications of the Roman Empire could ensure the spread and widespread institutionalization of the very same Christianity it sought to snuff out at the beginning. Christianity not only extinguished the gods of Rome, but served as the foundation of western civilization that would ultimately spread it around the world and make it accessible to all.
So the question, "Why didn't Christ and Christianity appear earlier?" is probably best answered simply by saying that It couldn't have, and still be what It is. Having said that, there were any number of prophets to let everybody know It was coming :-)
Who really knows if it has yet? For yourself, it just depends on what you believe.
Can you explain how someone can suddenly believe something that only minutes before, they required proof for? How does one go about making themselves believe the unbelievable?
You're thinking of God as if existence were simply one of His properties. But He IS existence. His very nature is to be: "I am who am". It is impossible for Him not to exist, for then existence itself would not exist.
I’ve met a lot of “atheists” on the internet. I’ve just never met one face to face. Every single one, after a brief question and answer will ALWAYS end up saying something like, “well, maybe I’m really more agnostic than atheist...”
Every. Single. One.
——One of the problems I have with theism is the argument that nothing can exist without being created, so therefore there must be a God, who wasn’t created, who created everything else.-——
The opposite is impossible, because it would mean that an infinite series of causal events, or moments in time, would have had to have been realized for us to exist now.
And an infinite series cannot exist in actuality, because any actual series must be finite.
—You’ve never met me, then.—
Nope. Not in person.
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