I have tried to believe in God and the Christian faith, but I cannot...

>in the middle of the desert

this is the kind of person who is "too knowledgeable" to believe

>evolved over vast aeons, and affirm that they were created immediately by God in a relatively brief period of time. This is not official Catholic doctrine, but it is, I think, the only position fully consonant with Catholic doctrine.

We have means to date things, so your world view requires willful ignorance to sustain itself.

...

>This is not official Catholic doctrine, but it is, I think, the only position fully consonant with Catholic doctrine.
The idea that God through time out of simpler forms created more sophisticated onces can be found in Augustine.

You need to take a motherfucking leap of faith

>Anyone that does not accept the faith will go to hell. Which means that the majority of humanity around the time of Christ (and for a long time after, even today) went to hell. Though to no fault of their own, simply because of geography. There was no way for Europeans, such as the Scandinavians, or the Chinese, to know about the Christian religion.

This is not the case. The theologians of the Catholic Church agree that God grants sufficient grace to all for their salvation. God will get the faith to anyone who sincerely desires to be in union with God. The problem is that so few people have that desire. It's true that those born in Christian countries have an immense advantage, but that's because their forefathers embraced the faith - and often suffered martyrdom for it - and that conferred a blessing on their descendants. It's not that the apostles didn't try to convert all nations. They went literally everywhere and converted who they could. The Scandinavians were idol-worshiping barbarians and not open to the faith, and the Chinese were stubborn. Nevertheless, there have been accounts in the history of the Church of a missionary finding that a foreign nation already had a knowledge of the faith because some angel or saint had instructed them. God gets the faith to those who are willing to hear it; it's just that so many are hard of heart, even in Christian countries.

>Why is the Christian God any more likely to be true than Zeus, Odin, Mars, or one of the other hundreds of God's? All counter arguments to this don't go beyond personal anecdotes. The worshipers of Jupiter no doubt had similar anecdotes for his existence.

God Almighty is metaphysically distinct from Zeus, Odin, or Mars. Zeus, Odin, or Mars are metaphysically on a plane with the angels (in fact, the scriptures say that they are angels, viz. fallen angels that fooled men into worshiping them). God is the absolute, omnipotent, omnipresent source of all Being, the Creator of all. Zeus, Odin, Mars are powerful spirits, yet they are merely creatures. In the sense that "Zeus" or "Jupiter" is understood to be God Almighty, the One God before all gods, as in the Hymn of Cleanthes, He is the same as the Christian God and is worshiped under another name.

Augustine rejected an old earth and vigorously affirmed its relative youth against those who said it was many tens of thousands of years old.

>We have means to date things

Biased interpretation of ambiguous data.

Here's the hymn by the Stoic Cleanthes, written before Christ. This is fully orthodox doctrine that can be upheld by any Christian.

Greatest of the gods, God with many names, God ever-ruling, and ruling all things!
Zeus, origin of Nature, governing the universe by law,
All hail! For it is right for mortals to address thee;
For we are thy offspring, and we alone of all
That live and creep on earth have the power of imitative speech.
Therefore will I praise thee, and hymn forever thy power.
Thee the wide heaven, which surrounds the earth, obeys:
Following where thou wilt, willingly obeying thy law.
Thou holdest at thy service, in thy mighty hands,
The two-edged, flaming, immortal thunderbolt,
Before whose flash all nature trembles.
Thou rulest in the common reason, which goes through all,
And appears mingled in all things, great or small,
Which filling all nature, is king of all existences.
Nor without thee, Oh Deity, * does anything happen in the world,
From the divine ethereal pole to the great ocean,
Except only the evil preferred by the senseless wicked.
But thou also art able to bring to order that which is chaotic,
Giving form to what is formless, and making the discordant friendly;
So reducing all variety to unity, and even making good out of evil.
Thus throughout nature is one great law
Which only the wicked seek to disobey,
Poor fools! who long for happiness,
But will not see nor hear the divine commands.
[In frenzy blind they stray away from good,
By thirst of glory tempted, or sordid avarice,
Or pleasures sensual and joys that fall.]
But do thou, Oh Zeus, all-bestower, cloud-compeller!
Ruler of thunder! guard men from sad error.
Father! dispel the clouds of the soul, and let us follow
The laws of thy great and just reign!
That we may be honored, let us honor thee again,
Chanting thy great deeds, as is proper for mortals,
For nothing can be better for gods or men
Than to adore with hymns the Universal King.

>Wouldn't it make more sense to appear in China? A place with an actual civilization.

Yeah, why did this idiot choose to show up in the lands of his chosen people, a little ways west of Mesopotamia, home of the oldest civilizations in the world, while all this territory was under the control of the weak and irrelevant Roman Empire? What kind of sense did that make?

Real American hours

>Augustine rejected an old earth and vigorously affirmed its relative youth against those who said it was many tens of thousands of years old.
And yet the idea of a sort of theistic evolution was there.

could you guys please provide relevant quotations when you say this stuff

That is hardly an argument. Everything that has the option to have an opinion has or can cause violence. Darwinism has but so has religion. And politics and nationalism. Nothing you're saying is proving any point one way or another.

No, I don't keep a list of Augustine quotes around me for questions on Veeky Forums. You can google it just as well as me.

alright well I'm discarding both of yalls sketchy opinions until I see something to back them up

You do that boy.

I'm British.

St. Augustine:

>Perhaps we ought not to think of these creatures at the moment they were produced as subject to the processes of nature which we now observe in them, but rather as under the wonderful and unutterable power of the Wisdom of God, which reaches from end to end mightily and governs all graciously. For this power of Divine Wisdom does not reach by stages or arrive by steps. It was just as easy, then, for God to create everything as it is for Wisdom to exercise this mighty power. For through Wisdom all things were made, and the motion we now see in creatures, measured by the lapse of time, as each one fulfills its proper function, comes to creatures from those causal reasons implanted in them, which God scattered as seeds at the moment of creation when He spoke and they were made, He commanded and they were created. Creation, therefore, did not take place slowly in order that a slow development might be implanted in those things that are slow by nature; nor were the ages established at plodding pace at which they now pass. Time brings about the development of these creatures according to the laws of their numbers, but there was no passage of time when they received these laws at creation
"They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed."

(Literal Meaning of Genesis, Book IV)

"They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed."

(City of God, Book XII)

>Biased interpretation of ambiguous data.

>thousands of scientists, some of which are religious themselves, are involved in a massive conspiracy

Sounds like you're changing things around for the benefit of your beliefs.

I'm not an atheist. I'm more agnostic and genreally don't think about these sort of things anymore. However, a thing that bothers me is that in this time period, we are born and are taught these things by people who have never had a primary encounter with anything they are saying. If God wants people to worship him, why doesn't he show up or something and tell everyone? Why make it so ambiguous for us?

I mean, imagine for a second that scientists have misinterpreted all of the empirical data out there. Imagine that they misinterpreted fossil records, put faith in carbon dating when it's actually just misleading, and assumed too much about the way DNA evolves over time.

If they can get all of this wrong, why do we trust them with other forms of empirical science? Why do we trust biology which leads to medicine? Why do we trust climate science? Why do we trust engineering? Why assume that they are willfully ignorant or willfully biased in one area to such a degree that their efforts are lies, and yet trust them in other areas so eagerly?

This popular theory that there is a vast conspiracy by scientists seems paradoxical and paranoid. The only reason you trust those other scientists is because you see their efforts working in daily life. Evolutionary biologists are doing the same work, but it's done in universities and doesn't really affect you one way or the other, and so you feel comfortable denouncing them as frauds. Do you honestly think that if you spent your entire life studying the theory and looking at the evidence that you would find a flaw which thousands of other scientists have been unable to find? Why do you trust yourself so much and trust them so little?

>That is hardly an argument.

It's not an argument against the theory of evolution itself, but merely a hypothesis for its social and political success.

The strongest argument against the theory of evolution itself is that it is self-refuting, because if our intellect is caused by totally random/chance material causes, then there is no reason to believe that any of our intellectual are trustworthy. This is the point that Darwin struggled with later in life. If our being is determined not by the mind of a divine intelligence, but merely by an irrational struggle for survival, then why believe Darwinism? Why not believe whatever increases your chances for survival? Or, as Nietzsche puts, it: "why truth? Why not lies?" The bottom-line of Darwinism is that transcendentals such as truth, goodness, and beauty don't matter, so there is no reason to defend Darwinism on the grounds that it is true.

>Why do we trust biology which leads to medicine?
Do we? Suppose you meet some biologists who tell you that, based on their biological expertise, they have devised a new drug to use against the common cold, and they want you to be the first to test it. In theory there should be no negative effects. Do you trust them?

Or do you only trust them after that drug has been through repeated and rigorous testing?

>This is the answer modern day Christians need to give to avoid looking like idiots. I think genesis was meant to be taken literally, and it certainly was, until science advanced our knowledge of the universe.
Origen didn't believe Genesis to be anything more than a myth. He did so 2000 years ago. You're just being a slave to the protestant mindset which is based on false assumptions.

Sums up my thoughts exactly. I couldn't be bothered typing out a full response. They will dismiss any science that contradicts their religion.

>a massive conspiracy

No, not anything sinister. It's just how institutions form biases. It's not like the whole of Nazi Germany, from the Fuhrer down to the housewife, was in conspiracy against the Jews. It was just a conspiracy by the upper echelons, and the lower people merely gave their consent in order to fit in. That's how it works. In order to get into a respectable position in the scientific community, you have to pass years of examinations regurgitating their doctrine, and if you contradict some of their more sacred doctrines you are ridiculed and outcast. That prevents people from questioning certain things. The scientific community is too heavily invested in Darwinism at this point. Millions of people have abandoned the faith of their ancestors on the grounds that the scientists are trustworthy when they tell us we are glorified apes. If this turned out to be false, there would be a great backlash against them, so they have to uphold the facade even when advances in genetics, for example, increasingly show how absurd the Darwinian hypothesis is.

thanks that's exactly what I was hoping for. other user isn't offering anything, so I think you win this argument

Blessedare they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

Why?

>If they can get all of this wrong, why do we trust them with other forms of empirical science? Why do we trust biology which leads to medicine?

You can test medicine, you can physically demonstrate its working. You can't test evolution. They tried breeding countless generation of fruitflies, and all they got were abhorrent mutants.

> Why do we trust engineering?

Produces results.

>Why assume that they are willfully ignorant or willfully biased in one area to such a degree that their efforts are lies, and yet trust them in other areas so eagerly?

Because Darwinism is not just a theory about how certain mechanics in the world works, like medicine and engineering. Darwinism is a cosmogenic myth, a theory about how the world came into being. Darwinism is the metaphysical position that the world created itself out of chaos, without any inherent order or purpose. This has profound implications in all areas of life: in religion, in philosophy, in law, in how we view ourselves and choose to order our lives. How penicillin works or how the steam engine functions isn't going to fundementally overturn our entire view of the universe and cause us to abandon our ancient traditions.

>This popular theory that there is a vast conspiracy by scientists seems paradoxical and paranoid.

See above post. I don't think it's a vast conspiracy at all, although I'm sure many scientists have privately covered up "anomalous data" in their research, not necessarily as a sinister conspiracy, but in order to make their papers look nicer because they fit into the established paradigm. It's mainly people that have been indoctrinated into looking at the world in a certain way, and only being able to see it through that lens.

Your argument is frankly terrible and makes me question your sanity.

There are hundreds of institutions around the world, many in competition with each other, with the means of performing carbon dating, one form of dating. Do you realize what an enormous incentive there is for scientists to prove all of that collective knowledge wrong? They would go down in the history books and would revolutionize an entire field, become the next Einstein, Darwin, or Euler.

It's about faith. Read some Kierkegaard and the Bible while you're at it.

>This is the answer modern day Christians need to give to avoid looking like idiots. I think genesis was meant to be taken literally, and it certainly was, until science advanced our knowledge of the universe.

It's still possible to take a great deal of Genesis literally even if the actual Creation story is somewhat metaphorical. The Fall absolutely has to be taken literally, for example, because without it there's no need for Christ and there's no such thing as Original Sin. Likewise, Abraham's story must be true, because it establishes him as the first Patriarch, and begins his covenant that will later be reborn as the New Covenant established by Christ.

It's also not all that much of a stretch to assume that many of the odder things in Genesis (strange gods, giants, half-angel monsters) might be true. This is particularly the case if you happen to be Catholic, and already believe that magic and spirits have genuine reality.

>Darwinism is... a theory about how the world came into being
You're confusing evolution with planet formation. Easy mistake. Evolutionary theory and general relativity are pretty much the same anyway.

I've read both and have not gotten an answer to my question. I wouldn't bother posting here if I didn't know background of the religion.

Try praying to God for the answer.

>Do you realize what an enormous incentive there is for scientists to prove all of that collective knowledge wrong? They would go down in the history books and would revolutionize an entire field, become the next Einstein, Darwin, or Euler.

I'm sorry I can't find the quote right now, but the one I'm thinking of is from a great scientist admitting that he didn't want to put his neck on the line in questioning the established paradigm. The point is that science is heavily influenced by politics. It's not a field of perfectly disinterested seekers of wisdom. People have their pride and reputation in it.

>they
It's one guy who even said earlier on it is the position he holds, but not the church

>You're confusing evolution with planet formation.

Darwinian evolution requires a universe where things happen by chance, and not by the intention of a divine intelligence. These are broader, philosophical presuppositions which underpin the biological hypothesis.

God shows up when he wants to, and sometimes when you ask him to. I've known more than one person who has had Christ appear to them in a dream, for example.

As for the public at large, they have the Church, they have the Bible, they have the theologians and the apologists. What more do they need? If they won't believe based on everything Christian that exists in the world today, would they really believe even if God came down from Heaven? Remember the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, what Abraham tells him at the end.

>if our intellect is caused by totally random/chance material causes, then there is no reason to believe that any of our intellectual are trustworthy
This is the sort of nonsense you come to believe if you aren't a materialist and you don't believe in empiricism. The proof that our intellect is trustworthy comes from empiricism, and the proof for the theory of evolution also comes form empiricism. If you don't believe in empiricism then you shouldn't have arguments about evolution.

>tries to start a thread about religion
>presupposes a conflict between reason and faith
>picks the birth of Christ as "when God shows up"
>scrolling on

>The proof that our intellect is trustworthy comes from empiricism

It's odd that you should say that, because empiricists like Hume agonized over the basic reliability of the intellect in arriving at the knowledge of things and their causes.

To keep it short: no. And stop calling it Darwinism. It shows you don't know what you're talking about.

>he thinks humans existed before ~4000 B.C.
you've been cucked by the education system

>Darwinism
I'm using as shorthand for materialistic evolution, as opposed to a spiritualist evolution like in Hinduism and Hegelianism.

Perhaps all religions and mythologies are set down forms of people's encounters with the Deity, and there is one Deity Who has been the same throughout every religion, just represented differently. Fools misunderstood the expressions of Deity because it is hard to set down in words. It requires allegory, parable, myth, etc., however, these inevitably become interpreted as dogma, and so people begin to worship an old white man in white robes with a white beard as if that were God.

You can learn a lot from any religion when you study it in depth, whether it's Islam or Greek mythology (not strictly a religion, but you get it), and if you read up on enough of them, you can begin to see very interesting likenesses. Alternatively, read authors who already delineated the similarities between them, such as Graves or Frazer.

>Darwinism is not just a theory about how certain mechanics in the world works, like medicine and engineering.
No, evolution IS just a theory about mechanics. When given a whole lot of data, like fossils and DNA and species like we have, the theory tries to come up with mechanics that explain this data. It has philosophical implications, but those are all secondary to answering the question "What exactly are all these fossils doing here and why do some of them look like us?"

>God is at fault for sin
nope, that's humanity, as well as satan & co.

>This is the answer modern day Christians need to give to avoid looking like idiots. I think genesis was meant to be taken literally, and it certainly was, until science advanced our knowledge of the universe.

shut up you unitarian filth

>'There is no conflict between religion and science,' Lemaitre has been telling audiences over and over again in this country …. His view is interesting and important not because he is a Catholic priest, not because he is one of the leading mathematical physicists of our time, but because he is both.

Have you tried being a fucking catholic...?

>No sin without free will
>No free will without God
>God put humans somewhere that Satan could get to them
If I put a child in a house with a gun and a psychopath and the psychopath convinces the child to shoot himself, I'm at fault. Doesn't matter that I didn't do the convincing or pull the trigger. I'd be even guiltier if it were my fault that the kid had free will.

Fuck Hume. The human intellect is obviously flawed, but that's not the question. Is our intellect trustworthy enough to come up with conclusions about the world around us? Yes. If you were to say no, then you would have to admit that it isn't trustworthy enough to come up with conclusions about the existence of god, either. Then, is the leading scientific theory that our intellect arose out of natural selection over hundreds of millions of years? Yes. These things are not contradictions. They can both exist at the same time.

To go back to your original statement
>if our intellect is caused by totally random/chance material causes, then there is no reason to believe that any of our intellectual are trustworthy
The cause of intellect cannot disprove what we know through intellect. I don't see why the cause of intellect has anything to do with the trustworthiness of our intellect. The cause of intelligence and the intelligence are two distinct things, and we have plenty of reasons to believe our intellect is trustworthy regardless of the way it came to be.

On top of that, it's naive to say that our intellect was created through random chance when natural selection is hardly a theory about randomness. Maybe the initial single celled organisms came out of randomness, but the existence of our intellect is the cause of a very non-random line towards organisms with higher intelligence.

>You can't test evolution.
Dude did you ever have biology classes? Genes? DNA? I mean if you look at the mechanism of evolution it should be understandable that it can work on its own (by chance). That doesn't mean that there can't be a God that designed and / or controls the evolutionary process, but there doesn't have to be.

If you want to believe so badly, just make up your own spiritual mumbo jumbo and be happy. It's pretty obvious that many christians go through great lengths in order to reconcile science and religion, so just don't bother. Believe what you want, but don't force yourself to be unscientific to believe it.

That's like saying it's the government's fault when a store is robbed because there aren't thousands of policemen patrolling the streets ready to shoot a potential robber at any given moment

Macroevolution can't be tested, unless humans somehow keep bilogical records as detailed as they are know for the next few millions of years.

Kek dude, no one actually believes in all this shit, they just join the communities because they're held down by tradition since the Greeks. It's just a big history club.

If you want real faith, go shack up with some Shamans in a third world jungle.

Yeah but the models which make macroevolution can be tested. These models include fossil records and long-term microevolutionary models. This fucking idea that macroevolution is a whole different sort of beast than microevolution is some real pleb shit.

I bet you also think that climate change is a hoax and strong AI is unattainable.

It kind of has to be all or nothing when you have a question of faith

There's a difference between being directly responsible for the only two people on earth before the fall of man and being in control of a police force responsible for countless individuals after the fall. You know in my example, it would be unreasonable not to hold me all but directly responsible.

> But of all the marvellous and mighty acts related of Him, this altogether surpasses human admiration, and is beyond the power of mortal frailness to understand or feel, how that mighty power of divine majesty, that very Word of the Father, and that very wisdom of God, in which were created all things, visible and invisible, can be believed to have existed within the limits of that man who appeared in Judea; nay, that the Wisdom of God can have entered the womb of a woman, and have been born an infant, and have uttered wailings like the cries of little children! And that afterwards it should be related that He was greatly troubled in death, saying, as He Himself declared, “My soul is sorrowful even unto death;” and that at the last He was brought to that death which is accounted the most shameful among men, although He rose again on the third day. Since, then, we see in Him some things so human that they appear to differ in no respect from the common frailty of mortals, and some things so divine that they can appropriately belong to nothing else than to the primal and ineffable nature of Deity, the narrowness of human understanding can find no outlet; but, overcome with the amazement of a mighty admiration, knows not whither to withdraw, or what to take hold of, or whither to turn. If it think of a God, it sees a mortal; if it think of a man, it beholds Him returning from the grave, after overthrowing the empire of death, laden with its spoils. And therefore the spectacle is to be contemplated with all fear and reverence, that the truth of both natures may be clearly shown to exist in one and the same Being; so that nothing unworthy or unbecoming may be perceived in that divine and ineffable substance, nor yet those things which were done be supposed to be the illusions of imaginary appearances. To utter these things in human ears, and to explain them in words, far surpasses the powers either of our rank, or of our intellect and language.

>God decides to show up 2000 years ago in the middle of the desert
Yeah the anthropological explanations as to why we have religions, gods and why they showed up in some area/time/culture or another I think really shoots the whole idea in the foot. Jehovah was some kind local god which thee Jewish tribe attached more and significance to,.influenced by Babylonian and Sumerian mythology. Jesus was a concept found in the Jewish oral tradition who showed up at just the right time when the Jews were being oppressed. Its not rocket science

>macroevolution
>climate change
>strong AI

never go full reddit

>>/r/eddit

>copt out

>strong AI

If the government was omnipotent, then yes, that would be partly their fault

Fuck this thread and all of you

Talk about literature or fuck off to reddit, /b/, /soc/ or wherever the fuck you want. Just fuck off from here.

Could there possibly be a religion more normie than Catholicism? Sentimentalism: the faith.

You're right, politics does influence science, but not to the point that science is rendered false. Frankly you sound like a conspiracy theorist who is too afraid to leave the cave. Science is PEER REVIEWED which means that accepted orthodoxy only becomes so after EXTENSIVE TESTING. Oh, and science changes. Wrong shit gets corrected all the time. There is nothing that politics can do to stop science, except temporarily.

The Roman empire was small beans compared to China, and Mesopotamia was a shit hole compared to it.

wow dude so deep my world religions professor will be so impressed

t. Xi Huang Gui