but how could they know it to be true, it isn't like the gospels of mark and luke and john and matthew were written during the lifetime of jesus

"You don't understand faith then, and I suspect it's something like a willful ignorance..."

I've never heard faith summed up so well

everyone needs faith.
faith is a synonym for confidence.

can you drive a car without confidence? can you talk to a girl without confidence? can you do *anything* without confidence?

that's the power of faith - you can argue it's based on nothing, but that 'nothing' opens the door to *everything*.

The early church accepted books as unofficial canon based on a few things:
1. The author (and this is why you have so many random "Gospel of Thomas" type books that were forged)
2. Acceptance by the early church as true
3. Encouraging/uplifting.

Really by the middle of the 2nd century, what we know as the canon of the New Testament was widely accepted as scripture.

you can't run away from it.. it is a part of you.. it is a part of your design

lazysummer: I grew up in a Deist environment, drifted away from the idea of an all-powerful being, have never experienced and great conversion or deconversion, and, having read the Satanic Bible, concluded it was as full of nonsense as the New Testament (which I also read.) Explain. :P

Also, confidence that I can drive a car, talk to a girl, or make any other sort of effort, is based on my past experience, not NOTHING.

@bartdogg42:
let's see how you score on the Creationist Bullshit meter:
"little evidence of intermediately life forms" (http://www.toarchive.org/indexcc/CC/CC200.html)+5
"life far to complex" (http://www.toarchive.org/indexcc/CB/CB010_1.html) +1
"the more science learns the less likely evolution happened" +1
"new information" (http://www.toarchive.org/indexcc/CB/CB102.html)+ 3
"evolution is random chance"(http://www.toarchive.org/indexcc/CB/CB940.html) +5
"belief in evolution the also faith" +3
"quoting the bible" +1 per quote
+18 not bad, but you missed some very important one:
"confusion biologic evolution with cosmology"
"I can't see how the eye evolved so god did it"

There are about 100 mainstream biology books explaining evolution out there, please read one of them. Reading posts like your is just too painful, which is why I don't discuses religion oder science with creationists.

And sceptic I'd say again I simply copied and pasted that scientific information.

You can still never explain how something came from nothing, and that's the ultimate trump card.

so all your saying is: I don't know therefor god.

where do you then get stuff like heaven, hell, souls from?

If that's the way you see it.

But essentially you're saying, "I don't know, so therefore NOT God."

No I'm saying I don't know.
Your particular god is as likely as any god, perhaps it really was Zeus, perhaps it really was the flying spaghetti monster, perhaps we're just a simulation in some computer, perhaps there are billions of universes and we're just one them, perhaps Beal made Ra who started the universe.
I don't know.

Heaven, Hell, souls and the like began at creation, when this nothingness came to being.

And not all Christians are 6-day creationists which is a common misconception everywhere, especially on this thread. Francis Collins, who wrote the "Language of God" in reply to one of Dawkins' books in fact holds to the validity of Christianity and a personal creator God, and claims evolution to be true. He worked on the human genome project and couldn't refute evolution. He is a Theistic Evolutionist, meaning he believes in a creator that chose to work through evolution. He is not alone in Christian circles.

All people hear about are the 6-day creationists.

Really you're saying "I don't know and I don't care enough to delve further"

"But essentially you're saying, 'I don't know, so therefore, probably not God.'"

Fixed.

or at least "I don't know and I'm comfortable not knowing solong as it means I don't have to believe in God"

"Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist." - Prokhor Zakharov, Alpha Centauri

bartdogg, that's fair enough. I don't absolutely doubt that Jesus was a real person, I was just pointing out that the evidence IS sparse, as it is for many ancient historical figures. It gets really muddied up though because Jesus was claimed to have performed miracles and people use this fact to justify the bombing of abortion clinics and to fight gay marriage and make other sorts of value judgements. I would demand much more evidence than what is available to justify such judgements. I'm not as skeptical of the existence of Thucydides because people don't have much to lose or gain from his existence so objectivity is more likely. The existence of Jesus is fraught with bias on both sides.

bartdogg, you can't be sure that something came from nothing in the case of the Big Bang, because there could have been lots of somethings outside our universe that affected the Big Bang but cannot physically affect us. I would say that nobody can adequately explain the ultimate cause of our universe and that it is folly to claim to know that it was a supreme being. Even that trump card only gets you as far as deism, and does not justify how someone can know the mind of God and be justified in carrying out this God's will.

it means I see no evidence that your particular god is very likely, remember its not just your god I don't believe in but all of the millions of gods that have been suggest by people in the history of humankind and all the billions and billions of possible gods that people could suggest.

bartdogg42:
You can still never explain how something came from nothing, and that's the ultimate trump card.
---
1) Evolution makes no claims about the beginning of life (Abiogenesis)... it only deals with... well... evolution of life.

Evolution IS a Blind Watchmaker:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0
The Origin of Life - Abiogenesis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg

2) Since when did the lack of an adequate explanation (to date) of a phenomena prove that some particular explanation MUST be the answer? If there is currently no adequate answer known to man, then there currently is no adequate answer known to man. To simply fall back on "it must be God" is weak. Absence of evidence is not proof. That is a logical fallacy known as "Argument from Ignorance"

I agree crisp, and we seem to be having two different conversation at the same time. One I was simply trying to present evidence for a God (I believe this is Theism, though you keep calling it Deism which is the belief that a creator-being made everything and then sat back and never intervened again). The other conversation was the validity/accuracy of Jesus/NT MSS.

And you have no argument from me that the person of Jesus is fraught with bias. Thus the need for wise historians who will accurately handle all the material. I believe you can immediately weed out any with just biblical/historical "scholar" on the person of Jesus that is using any hint of emotional language (which is why I discredit Dawkins pretty quick -> his disdain for christians and christianity is loaded with emotion).

And you're right, to trumpet your actions as God's will is always tricky territory and has in fact been used to reenforce numerous tragedies throughout history (slavery in the US comes immediately to mind).

The trump card I believe still remains because even those "somethings outside our universe" still had a beginning at some point. Where and when, who knows, but someTHING or someONE had to begin things. They came from nothing and were something.

The idea of something having no beginning seems as logical to me as the idea of an all-powerful being making something from nothing.

Besides - who made God, then?

Dexter I don't believe it's that we just "don't know yet", it's that we can never, in any type of vaccuum, have nothing. Thus, it'll always be impossible to create something from nothing.

That's part of what makes YHWH such a great name for God. Literally "I am".

Noone made God, God was, and is and always will be. That's how the Bible explains God.

So pandarsenic I believe the mistake in your question is that you only credit God as being an "all-powerful being". the God of the Bible is nothing like Zeus or an all-powerful being. He is much more.

The point is, the concepts of Something From Nothing and a God are, in my mind, about equally paradoxical.

bartdogg: "No one made the universe. The universe was, and is, and always will be."

And therein lies the hangup. I find it much more of a leap of faith to believe something came from nothing (since this we can touch and feel and see) than to believe that someone (that we can't see/feel/touch) began what is perceivable as something.

Pandarsenic: confidence threw experience is more of a mindtrick. you trick yourself into believing that you are able. when a circumstance changes, say you meet with a much more attractive woman, your confidence fades. why?
similiarly people derive faith/confidence virtually anything - their heritage, their goodlooks, their new jeans, their magical necklace.
whatever it is - you need it.
there is a 'blind' belief before any results can be materialized.

thus "all things are possible to those who have faith"

confidence through*