At least that’s what the office told me when they gave me the disk of pictures. I have no other pictures of my brain with which to compare, and I’ve never seen my brain in person so as to recognize it from these hazy black and white pictures which I’m told came from a big magnet. It remains entirely possible that the pictures on that disk are pictures of somebody else’s brain.
Or that this is a Xerox image of something made entirely of playdough. I can’t prove that it’s not.
Here’s a comment from one of our many friends on the internet, who left this comment here. He said the following:
Science does not tell us that “the universe is not eternal in the past, but came into being.”
Firstly, the question of whether time is past-finite or past-infinite is an open one in cosmology. It has not yet been answered, despite the claims of some apologists to the contrary. There are some good reasons for thinking that time might be past-finite. There are other good reasons to think that it might not be.
More importantly, whether or not the universe is temporally past-finite, there was never a time in which the universe did not exist. Even if time had a first, initial moment, the universe existed in that moment. There were no moments prior to the first in which the universe didn’t exist. The idea that time could possibly “come into being” is entirely incoherent.
Unfortunately for you, whether or not a God exists, whether or not time is past-finite, if time is a part of the physical universe (as has been held by philosophy and Classical Theology dating at least as far back as St. Augustine) then there was never a time in which the physical universe did not exist, and it is therefore nonsense to claim that the universe “came into being.”
IHOP, the International House of Pancakes, announced not very long ago that they were going to start serving burgers. Not only that, but they were going to serve burgers SO GOOD that they decided to change their name to IHOB.
The Internet lost their collective minds.
It’s not exactly like the Twitter mob came home from a long 4 hour shift at Walmart to find their favorite cat strung up in the yard like a make shift piñata. It was more like they found their mother hanging their cat as a piñata a so Nazis could take turns hitting it with a crowbar.
Calvinists like to use the raising of Lazarus as a metaphor for what salvation is like. Our boy Lazarus is dead, and lying in his grave for a handful of days. He clearly is not going anywhere on his own. But then Jesus shows up.
Jesus goes to the tomb and prays, and then
he cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out.” The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
John 11:43-44
Our friend Calvin says that THIS is what salvation is like. We’re ALL dead, and Jesus comes to some tombs and calls us out of them, and we are alive again, or what we might call, Born Again. And to some extent, this is something no one would argue with. So naturally, the Calvinists had to find a way to get people to argue with them about it, because Calvinists love an argument like I love a pizza so loaded with cheese and toppings than people at the next table can hear my arteries begging for mercy.
Jesus says turn the other cheek. Darwin says survival of the fittest. When Will Smith walked up onto the 2022 Oscar stage and slapped the taste out of Chris Rock’s mouth, it may have had an evolutionary advantage. Who can say? Jesus would have condemned this act of televised violence, but what does science tell us?
Science can measure the force exerted on Rock’s face, but can it measure the rightness or wrongness of walking up on stage and slapping the taste out of a man’s mouth during the Oscars?
My friend Jim stopped by to leave his thoughts on something I has written:
I get your point, but all you have for your proof is a book that claims itself true which is a nonsensical argument. It is also filled with things that are not true. Which ones are you selecting? I have no burden of proof whatsoever. The universe just is, and if I can’t explain in detail how that happened it doesn’t make you right based on a book that claims it’s right. The Quran does the same thing. And I don’t believe that either, but it would be just as valid if I did.
I’m going to say it because not enough people know this yet. George Floyd committed suicide.
He was not killed by the police. He died because of his own choices. Had the police simply let him off with a warning and never touched him, he would have been dead within the hour anyway. He killed himself.
“Forever Breathing in Our Hearts” sounds kind of horrifying…
Before you go throwing full wine bottles at your computer screen, let me make my case, and let me encourage you to check out everything I am saying to see for yourself. After that, go ahead and throw full wine bottles at your computer screen, but I’m not buying you a new one.
And now the transcript of “Fixing the Prodigal Son” by internet celebrity pastor, Calvinist Big Beardo the Baptist:
Brothers, I can say with confidence that we Calvinists have a faith and respect for the Bible that far outweighs that of the Arminians. I think we all know that the non-Calvinists are still lost in their fleshly sin, relying upon the wisdom of MAN instead of the WORD OF GOD. They worship at the alter of FREE WILL, rejecting the sovereignty of God, and instead insisting that we can make choices. This heresy is the result of their own blindness, given to them by God, and the result of the total depravity with which we are all born. The Bible clearly teaches Calvinism, and as such we know that Jesus was a Calvinist. This much is obvious. Jesus would not have taught anything like Free Will. He would have ONLY taught that God alone has the ability to make choices, and that God meticulously determines ALL THINGS.
So what do we do when we get to something like Luke 15, where in Jesus tells the Parable of the Prodigal Son? Common sense will tell us that, since Jesus was a Calvinist, he wouldn’t have told this parable the way we find it in Luke. Either the text was corrupted by Arminian scribes in the 1400s, or Jesus was being sarcastic for some reason. So when we see a teaching of Jesus which seems to teach that sinners choose to sin, and that they can also choose to repent and return to God, we have a choice to make. Do we conclude that Jesus was being sarcastic, like he was with that whole “Camel through the eye of a needle” thing? Or do we choose to accept the difficult idea that the Arminians could have corrupted the holy, perfect and inerrant King James Bible?
Either way, I have taken it upon myself to fix this parable, and I now present it to you in the way Jesus WOULD have originally told it, so that it teaches the truth of Calvinism.
I’m not sure if I made my position clear on AI, so let me try one more time here. Not what I consider a vital topic, but a very fun one to discuss. The question, “Will we ever make REAL A.I., (meaning self aware robots that can make free will choices)?” can’t be answered until you have a world view from which to answer it.
In reply to THIS ARTICLE, Amanda wrote in and said:
Can you provide a reference to a single scientist who has claimed that “everything came from nothing”?
Greetings Amanda! I COULD provide a reference to a single scientist who has claimed that “everything came from nothing” but instead, here’s half a dozen in their own words: thanks for your question!
She pretended to watch the video, and replied again.
Actually, did you even watch that vid?..
The scientists you’re referring to are not claiming the universe LITERALLY came from nothing. They are speaking from a perspective of “nothing” meaning nothing supernatural.
Do you really believe that most or even many atheists literally think the universe “came from nothing”? That doesn’t even make sense. We acknowledge that the universe has an origin, but rather than simplifying it with “god”, we man up and admit that we currently don’t know the origin.
Hello again Amanda, Yes, I watched the vid. I made that vid.
