I don’t think anyone has all the answers to who created the world. I know I don't.
I was once a devout unbeliever but what changed my seemingly strong stance was just "a reasonable doubt".
What if I can't explain EVERYTHING? Does that mean that God MIGHT be real?
So here are some of the things that intrigued me:
- Most secular scholars agree that Jesus WAS a real person
- If we did have 100s of millions of years of dinosaurs and even millions of years of mankind... where are all the bones? We should be swimming in them!
- If rivers, like the Amazon, dump billions of tonnes of sediment into the ocean and they have been doing this for 100s of millions of years, how high must the South American continent been to start with? http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v278/n5700/abs/278161a0.html
- How did so many fully-developed and diverse languages appear around the same time? As a tertiary-educated polyglot, I wouldn't have the faintest how to develop grammar. So how would uneducated hunter-gatherers have achieved this feat?
- Many cultures in different parts of the world have a flood story
- The good old chestnut... how did complex organs like the eye develop gradually?
- Even better, how did complex sexual organs and processes that work in tandem in a male and female of any species spontaneously develop AT THE SAME TIME?
- One more. The human brain is the most complex thing in the universe. Man in all his wisdom has not been able to create anything even close to it, yet evolution demands that we believe it “just happened” over a period of time!
The skeptics and diehard atheists will always respond... chance and time. Explains everything but really explains nothing.
Skeptics have to prove that EVERYTHING in our universe could have occurred without a Creator. Christians only have to show that ONE thing is impossible.

Dear Oliver,
Unlike david f, I do not believe that God created Evil - directly or indirectly.

It is purely philosophical whether Evil was automatically "created" along with Good (as a logical counterpoint - freedom of choice allows for doing the opposite of Good)... or whether Good and Evil is a "created thing" at all.

The fundamental theological truth/understanding is that God is holy so that He CANNOT be involved in evil. In fact, evil is annihilated in His presence.

So rather than postulate that God created Evil allowing satan a choice to rebel, I would lean heavily towards the idea that all beings (eternal and mortal) have a choice in their values and that these values/ethics are intrinsic to life, not an "optional extra."
So God allowed freedom of expression in Heaven and satan, being puffed up with pride, chose to try to usurp God's rightful place as King.

Some theories exist that satan was insanely jealous that God had installed Man as ruler over the Earth rather than him (pure conjecture). Still, why did envy enter satan’s heart (if that scenario were true)?

In any case, I do not wrestle with how Evil appeared, since the ultimate solution to the problem of Evil/Sin is provided for in Christ's atoning work on the cross.

Why worry about where your debt came from if you have a billion dollars in the bank?

God does not require worship for His ego, but because nature demands it. It is just a natural response of created beings to bow down to that which they are overawed by. God created man for our own benefit (to experience life), not His.

(ctd) Dawkins’ non-sequitur consists in his insistence that science and/or reason COMPEL you to chose the one alternative, making the other world-view alternative - shared by thousands of intellectuals, philosophers or scientists, contemporary and throughout history - necessarily “anti-rational” and “anti-science” or worse. I know, Dawkins is not the only one who thinks like that, and until recently also most Christian theologians thought the same way (of course, in defence of the other alternative).

Oliver,
>>Such a person (anthropologist) has the religions ... in a fully detached manner <<
I do not know why an anthropologist could not be a theist, or even a Christian, but you are right about the detachment. In a recent reply to relda I wrote (about the sociologist of religion par excellence):

“You are right about (Peter) Berger: if he offered a judgement - positive or negative - on religion or faith, it would diminish the value of his findings and theories as a sociologist.” The same about the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, the author of my favourite (anthropological) definition of religion.

Also, it never occurred to me to compare Dawkins with Sells who - as far as I understand him - denies or ridicules neither science’s nor religion’s merits.

>>The existence of evil is a problem it seems even for a believer.<<
Without the bad, there is no notion of the good, if you did not know darkness you would not recognise light; nobody spoke of positive numbers before they had the concept of negative numbers.

Lao Tsu in Tao Te Ching (translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English) says it thus:

“Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.”
etc.

george:

1) i agree entirely that one can adopt a religious-faith attitude without actually involving a religion. in particular, i'm no more thrilled with knee-jerk atheism than you are.

2) your answer to my request re dawkins was a non-answer. read your post: it definitely attacks the religious fervor of the meeting, but not just the religious fervor. you claimed that what dawkins believes, or at least believed, was nonsense. change the word if you like, but the substantive charge remains. you've given no evidence for that, not one teensy example. (paraphrasing dawkins obviously doesn't cut it).

by contrast, i can easily point to nonsense in any sellick piece, and argue clearly why it is nonsense. or choose your favorite religious leader or religious scholar. maybe i'll think what they write is nonsense, maybe not. but i strongly suspect the former, and i suspect that i can back it much better than you have backed up your swipe at dawkins.

MartinsS wrote: Unlike david f, I do not believe that God created Evil - directly or indirectly.

Dear MartinsS,

I don't believe that God created evil as I don't believe there is such an entity as God. I quoted the Bible. According to the Bible God created evil. I quote the Bible again.

From the King James Version Isaiah 45:7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

Go argue with the Bible.

It’s interesting to note how Richard Dawkins calls himself a "post-Christian atheist" and talks about celebrating Christmas. It would perhaps be more accurate to call him a pre-Christian atheist, because he has never understood what Christianity is about in the first place. It’s rather like Madonna calling herself post-Marxist - she’d have to read him first to be ‘post-him’. Dawkins does, in certain respects, ‘make sense’, however, the crass mistakes he make are about the superficial. A lot of the time, he's either banging at an open door or he's shooting at a straw target. One can certainly agree with someone like Christopher Hitchens who says that, from an objective viewpoint, most religion appears as fairly hideous and purely ideological. However, there are other potentials in the gospel and in the Christian tradition which are, or should be, of great interest to radicals, and radicals haven't sufficiently recognised that.

Alan Watts shows us the two mythical models (or basic ideas) on the nature of reality (The Nature Of Consciousness: http://deoxy.org/w_nature.htm) on which we base our thinking. He outlines these two models as currently prevalent within the western mind, i.e. ‘the ceramic’ and ‘the automatic’. He correctly suggests that the hypothesis of God doesn’t help in our ability to make predictions – whereas science does. Science is in the business of ‘prophecy’ (or the art of prediction) based on the physical and regular laws of the universe.

Science has certainly formed the concept that reality itself is blind energy or as Freud would put it, reality is libido i.e., blind lust. “..for you and I are flukes in this cosmos, and we like our way of life - we like being human, if we want to keep it, say these people, we've got to fight nature, because it will turn us back into nonsense the moment we let it. So we've got to impose our will upon this world as if we were something completely alien to it…” (A.Watts). Our colonial legacy (and brutal past) certainly pays tribute to this idea and hostility toward nature, and quite mistakenly taken as 'Christian'.