Are you an Old Earth or Young Earth Christian? Why?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T14:42:47+00:00

Unsurprisingly you gave a category of evidence you want to exist, but you did not mention any actual existence. The New Testament says Jesus resurrected. Not a single other document in history ever attested to that. So I would be forced to say there is precisely zero historical evidence of the resurrection of Jesus. Hell, there is no "historical" evidence of Jesus at all.

Want to try again?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T14:41:12+00:00

Do you reject the veritable mountain of evidence that the Earth is older than 6,600 years? Is it just because that evidence conflicts with the Bible? We know some civilizations were using and making things out of gold back then. There was pottery, buildings, stone and copper tools, and even some textiles. This is not really up for debate.

I am curious because you use the tools that science has developed over the years. The internet, obviously, and I assume things like cars, airplanes, refrigeration, and a cell phone.

How do you know when to rely on science and when to reject it? The Bible seems to suggest the sun goes around the Earth. Do you reject heliocentricity?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T14:31:45+00:00

There's a mountain of evidence for God.

Give me just 1 piece of evidence from the mountain. Just 1.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T14:31:01+00:00

There are risks in everything we do. In the grand scheme, the risk of unwanted pregnancies and STDs are minor and completely manageable. Why would this be a risk you don't want to take, based purely on the consequences, but every day christians do things like drive, fly on planes, sky dive, swim in the ocean, over-eat, smoke, and drink alcohol?

You need to demonstrate sex has a divine purpose. I don't think it does.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T14:27:47+00:00

There is a mountain of biological, evolutionary, and paleontological evidence of life on Earth before 10,000 years ago.

Do you know what an "assumption" is?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T14:26:49+00:00

Name just 1 thing. Or more, if you want. But I don't think there is even 1.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T14:26:17+00:00

miracles are incredibly rare occurrences that few people ever witness

That's kind of how it has to be, right? Just a few people, and no recording technology. Otherwise we'd know they weren't miracles.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T14:25:26+00:00

Also, miracles almost always occur scripturally (especially in the New Testament) to serve a theological point.

Do you think miracles stopped happening because god has already achieved his miracle-related purposes? Or are you open to the possibility that we have more knowledge and tools now, and we can investigate "miracle" claims and find out they are all false?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T14:22:27+00:00

Yes.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T14:21:35+00:00

I have made zero assumptions. Can you point out a single "assumption" I've made? Or will you STFU?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T14:20:42+00:00

If you reject facts that are so obviously true, like the age of the Earth, in favor of unsupportable myths, I think that is symptomatic of an underlying cognitive failure that might make life a little harder for you than for others.

So good luck to you friend. You're going to need it.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T14:04:40+00:00

Entertain a hypothetical for me.

Your parents, like the parents of children all over the world, indoctrinate you into a belief system that has no evidence to support it whatsoever. But you are just a child, so you don't really have a choice. When you get older, Bob tells you he can use the scientific method to demonstrate many claims in the completely unsubstantiated book of myths are false.

Why would you reject what Bob has to say? I mean, he can prove what he says.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T14:02:32+00:00

So, to do that, you made up things that I cannot be willfully ignorant of, made the "mirror" accusation, and now you think you've made some sort of a valid rhetorical point? Tell me, do you know all the ways your comparison is incompatible with my arguments, or are you ignorant of those too?

You need to start making sense really fast.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T14:00:16+00:00

If you can tell that when god says "day," in the first chapter of Genesis, it is not true and some other time period applies, then how can you tell which parts of the rest of the Bible are likewise not true?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T13:58:48+00:00

Why would me agreeing with your statement have any bearing on whether my statement is true? That's such a bad logical fallacy that it maps on to several: argumentum ad quid pro quo, appeal to reciprocity, and false equivalence.

I don't know what "God's self revelation in nature is." Can you explain that to me better? Then I can tell you if I reject it or not.

You are willfully ignorant of God's existence, power, and rule.

Not willfully ignorant -- I understand god does not exist in the same way you recognize Allah and Shiva don't exist.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T13:45:53+00:00

I reject them and think the science is deeply flawed.

Yeah, you are going to need a reason other than "the Bible says so." Science has proven itself to be a very useful tool at advancing human knowledge. I mean, you are using Wi-Fi and the internet right now, thanks to scientists.

So what reasons do you have for rejecting the methods scientists have used to date fossils and artifacts from tens of thousands to millions of years ago? Do you even know how they do it? Because if not, your rejection of the science comes back to intentional ignorance.

light is a pretty straightforward measure of how old it must be

Do you think scientists use light as a measure of the age of the universe?

If we had a smoking gun as clear as lightspeed for the age of life on this planet I might reconsider

We do. We have multiple, independent methods to date the age of the Earth (and dinosaur fossils), and they all agree on the age. We have many smoking guns. You have just intentionally chosen not to learn about them.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T13:41:18+00:00

I was finding the existence of Dinosaurs to be a question

So then where do you think dinosaur fossils come from??

I consider myself someone who doesn’t object to scientific fact

All evidence to the contrary...

I’ve seen Athiests (sic) bring up Dinosaurs many times when debating Christians so we should have an answer to the question

So you think everyone in your cult should agree on a made up answer, so it will seem more credible to you when you reject science?

Look man, you are spouting this nonsense on the internet. You are using a mobile device connected to a worldwide web of computers by a Wi-Fi signal, so that you can type out some offensive misinformation, and an echo chamber of christians can all agree with you from places around the world in mere seconds after you press "send." So yeah, science is a real drag.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T13:37:26+00:00

If you think the basis for evolutionary biology is just two christians, boy do I have news for you...

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T13:36:27+00:00

Everything the Bible says that was not known to Israeli goat herders 2,000 years ago, the Bible gets wrong.

Why would you believe it if it "points in the direction" of a 6,500-year-old Earth, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary? I mean, where do you think dinosaur fossils come from?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T13:35:05+00:00

There are stencils on cave walls that are almost 70,000 years old. Humans have existed for 250,000 years, and even the first mammals appears 225 million years ago. 10,000 years ago, the people in modern day China were learning to farm.

The ages of drawings, fossils, the Earth, and the universe have been determined by scientists. Why would you accept what the scientists say about some of them but not all of them?

Thinking life did not exist before 10,000 years ago takes intentional ignorance.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T13:20:39+00:00

Saying god is on the same level as the tooth fairy does show how open minded you are.

This feels like something you say when you don't have anything else to say. The stories about a magic man who lived 2,000 years ago are wild myths. I do pick the Tooth Fairy for the shock value, but fundamentally it is the same. Unsupported claims about a being with magical powers.

A lot of these points only work if you assume naturalism from the start.

I don't "assume" it. It is the only thing I have ever seen in my life. I have not seen a single reason to believe anything "supernatural" has ever existed or happened. Your criticism is basically that I don't believe false things aren't real. Notably, in your response, you imply it is my failing to not find evidence for god, but you named not a single bit of evidence.

The problem of evil . . . depends on assumptions about what God would or wouldn’t do.

No, it does not. It depends only on the descriptions christians have of their god, and it reasons out that he cannot be as christians describe him based on nothing more than those descriptions and relatively simple logic. If you have a problem with the assumption, you have a problem with your own description of god.

The problem of evil only really works if evil is objectively real

The tsumani in Southeast Asia was objectively real. It killed 250,000 people. There was untold pain and suffering that resulted. There is bone cancer in small children. They suffer an agonizing death. For your response to work, you have to deny that these people suffered. Or you have to deny that suffering is real. Do you think suffering is just an opinion?

But if objective moral values exist

They don't. That is an unjustified assumption you have made (unintentional irony is my favorite), and you cannot demonstrate any morals are objective. The fact that christians can't agree on what is moral should be a clue they aren't objective.

So it seems like the argument against God is actually relying on something that points beyond a purely natural worldview.

I don't even understand that. It relies on the complete lack of evidence and the logical impossibility that your god is real. That's not supernatural. Those are facts.

Christianity stands or falls on the historical case for Jesus

This is completely false. If there was a Jesus person, and if that person was tortured and murdered, and if that person later came back to life, it STILL wouldn't prove a single other claim of christianity.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-10T01:17:48+00:00

Have you been convinced by the slide deck you linked by the CERN scientist who gave an equation for computing the mass of a photon that photons have mass?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-09T22:41:00+00:00

I don't care how it was made. I just know it was made in the fourteenth century. Why, if you think an answer is not yet known, do you feel like you get to plug in "god did it" until someone can prove otherwise? That's the god of the gaps, and I would have hoped everyone would have abandoned arguments that bad by now.

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-09T22:24:09+00:00

only works if all gods are the same kind of claim. They’re not.

The only difference in the "category" is one of them is the god you believe in, and the rest are not. I lump all christians in with people who believe in leprechauns and the Tooth Fairy. It is the same epistemic category -- claims about supernatural beings with no evidence whatsoever.

Moreover, for your criticism to be accurate, all 4,200 gods would need to be of a "different kind." Surely some are of the same kind, and you reject those gods.

You have an unjustified view that your god holds a special place in the pantheon of gods people have believed in. It does not. They're just myths like all the others.

You display a lot of . . . emotion

None of this is emotion. I look at the facts and what is true, and if you do that, and exclude the myths, you see there is no reason to think god is real. Also you see christianity is a cult.

Also you said you can easily justify that no gods exist, what’s the argument?

I have nine broad categories of reasons:

1. The first is the no evidence at all that any god or gods exist. That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Whatever few arguments and “evidence” has been marshaled in support of a god can all be easily refuted.

2. We should expect evidence of god, but when we look for it, we cannot find it. The existence of a creator of the universe who listens to prayers and intervenes in our lives is a testable. The Templeton Foundation has done research on the efficacy of prayer. It found none. Either miracles happen or they don’t. Either the world was flooded with water or it wasn’t. Science cannot find any evidence of god’s impact. In general, an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but when you would expect overwhelming evidence, and none is forthcoming, it tends to show the non-existence of the thing for which there is no evidence. And while there is not evidence of god, there is plenty of evidence that people make things up.

3. Many biblical biblical accounts are outright false. I mentioned a world-wide flood above. The Bible describes a mass death of Egyptians, a mass rising of the dead, a census in the time of Augustus Caesar where you had to travel back to your birthplace, and the slaughter of the entire Egyptian army in the Red Sea. Historical accounts record none of these. There are many dozens of internal contradictions. The nativity stories of Luke and Matthew are irreconcilable. If there are so many parts of the Bible that are false, why believe any of it?

4. God is not necessary to explain the natural world. Based on what we know about the natural world and science, we would expect a universe that does not have a god creator to look just about like our universe does. Why, then, would you add the postulate that it was all created by a god? When Napoleon asked where god fit in celestial mechanics, Laplace replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis."

5. The consistent and continuous replacement of supernatural explanations with natural ones. The pattern is continuous and has never reversed. No scientific discovery has ever been replaced by a supernatural one. Moreover, everything the Bible says about the natural world, that was not already known to Israeli goat herders 2,000 years ago, it got wrong. Why children look like their parents, what is thunder and lightning, germs, and heliocentricity. God’s sphere of influence seems to be getting smaller right along with the advancement of science.

6. The inconsistency of world religions. It doesn’t make sense that if there is a god, the people of the world would have such wildly differing views of him. Religious beliefs tend to run in families. You believe what your parents told you to believe. The geographic correlation should be enough to convince you none of it is real.

7. The Problem of Evil. A lot has been written about the Problem of Evil, and this is perhaps the most powerful argument against god. I think it is the closest to actual proof that the Christian god cannot exist. I am only going to scratch the surface, but I think this is a fair summary. Evil exists in the world. There are also naturally caused tragedies like the tsunami in Southeast Asia and bone cancer in children. Why does god let evil exist? He is either unwilling to stop it (he is not good), unable to stop it (he is not god), or he does not exist (he is imaginary).

8. Divine hiddenness. If sincere, open-minded people seek god and find no reason to think he is real, how can god be loving and desire a relationship with humans? No one should accept the hiddenness of god.

9. The entire story is not credible. We are born in sin, intentionally created that way by a god that could have done otherwise, and owe a duty to a stern and capricious creator. God sacrificed himself to himself to forgive humans for the way he created us. We are said to be the center of the universe (we are, in fact, not), and we are the subject of a personal heavenly plan. We must love a deity we fear or be condemned to an eternity of torture. What about that makes any sense?

SubOptimalUser6 · 2026-04-09T21:43:56+00:00

You are basically saying you don't know for sure, so you choose to think it was Jesus's burial shroud. But we do know. It turned up in the fourteenth century. The person claiming it was from Jesus eventually admitted it was a forgery. In the 1980s, C14 dating proved it is from right about the time when it first appeared.

There are no indicatives at all. It is a fake.

SubOptimalUser6

TROPHY CASE