True science and true religion agree together.

Clete said:

How do you propose we tell the two apart?

There is a very specific answer to that question. I want to see if you have an idea of what it is.

Click to expand...

I see you have a very specific answer in mind, and it would be scientifically pushing the odds to think I will guess what you have in mind. So, I am all ears to hear how you tell true/empirical and "so called" science apart. I just have a "bull detector" which goes off when folks say something stupid about science.

iouae said:

....we see distant galaxies. We see quarks and subatomic particles, and gravity waves and... and...

A telescope is a time machine which we can use to see into the past, with our own eyes, for a few $.
Turns out we can see pretty far into the past.

Click to expand...

Everything you said before these lines was right on but the above quoted portion of your post presupposes so much more than you clearly have any idea about. It just isn't true that we have observed quarks, for example. And the distances to galaxies are based, almost entirely, on red-shift theory, which is not the settled science that you think it is. And gravity wave detection is one of the biggest and most expensive examples of pseudo-science that has ever been performed. They don't even know for a fact that the objects that supposedly produced these waves actually exist! They can't even tell you what is propagating this wave beyond simply giving it the meaningless name "Space-time". The last 100+ years of cosmological science has been devoted to mathematics, not physics. Einstein has been elevated to the level as saint (if not further than that) and ALL of mainstream science is performed from well within that paradigm. Questioning either Einstein or cosmological and/or biological evolution will cost you your telescope (or lab) time, your funding, your professorships, your career.

I'm just telling you that they do not know for a fact half of the things you see and hear on cable television and hear about in "pop science" for want of a better term. Most of what you see and hear about science not only isn't confirmed scientific fact but is, in fact, political. And I do mean political in the sense of liberal vs conservative. It is aimed primarily at discrediting theism in general and Christianity in particular. The left has completely dominated the whole of science. Starting from grade school all the way to and through the centers of "higher learning" and beyond. Why a Christian would choose to trust it implicitly the way you seem to is beyond my ability to grasp. I don't get what would motivate such an attitude toward something so antithetical to the idea that God exists and that the Bible is His word.

Clete

iouae said:

I see you have a very specific answer in mind, and it would be scientifically pushing the odds to think I will guess what you have in mind. So, I am all ears to hear how you tell true/empirical and "so called" science apart. I just have a "bull detector" which goes off when folks say something stupid about science.

Click to expand...

There's no guess really. I only have a specific answer in mind because there is only one answer.

The answer is reason. Simple, sound, logical reason.


All knowledge - ALL KNOWLEDGE - no matter the topic or source, is founded upon these three laws. There is no fact that conflicts with them nor any argument that can be formed without using and thereby affirming them. Any thought that does not conform to them is false, by definition. Reason is not only the basis of all knowledge it is the only means anyone has for acquiring, interpreting and understanding any point of knowledge. Any claim to knowledge in spite of reason is a lie, by definition. Any point of knowledge that comes via an error of logic is a misunderstanding, by definition. All truth is rational, by definition - which happens to be the subject of your thread.


Now, let's see if you'll care to take a guess at what the veracity of reason itself is predicated on. I'll give you a hint. There is a fundamental flaw in the atheist's thinking that destroys their entire worldview. I won't belabor the point, I'm not trying to put you on the spot. If you'd rather, I'll just tell you but if you care to give a stab at it, it'll be interesting to see what your guess is.

Clete

Clete said:

Now, let's see if you'll care to take a guess at what the veracity of reason itself is predicated on. I'll give you a hint. There is a fundamental flaw in the atheist's thinking that destroys their entire worldview. I won't belabor the point, I'm not trying to put you on the spot. If you'd rather, I'll just tell you but if you care to give a stab at it, it'll be interesting to see what your guess is.

Clete

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Since I would not have come close to guessing your previous answer, I will forego any further guessing what you have in mind. I am all ears.

iouae said:

Since I would not have come close to guessing your previous answer, I will forego any further guessing what you have in mind. I am all ears.

Click to expand...

The atheistic worldview is predicated on the idea that nothing is to be taken by faith. This is their most fundamental philosophical pillar. Everything they do, think or say is built on the idea that the veracity of every claim must and can only be established by logic and reason. They do, however, find themselves perched on the horns of a dilemma whenever anyone asks them to establish the veracity of reason itself. They can say that logic is axiomatic, which is what they almost always do, but this is the equivalent to being a presuppositionalist in that they are taking the veracity of logic on faith, which is antithetical to their worldview. The other option is to attempt to make some sort of argument that defends the veracity of logic. This is question begging, since any argument presupposes the veracity of logic and therefore assumes what they are trying to prove. They are forced to either break the laws of reason or else take the veracity of reason on faith. They thereby undermine their own worldview every time they make a truth claim or, for that matter, every time they utter an intelligible word. The atheist is therefore FORCED to violate his own worldview at every turn. The atheistic worldview is therefore false. Therefore, God must exist because of the rational impossibility of the contrary.

That is a brief presentation of the Transcendental Argument for the existence of God (TAG for short). It is one way of communicating the fact that all truth is predicated on, not just the existence of God, but on God Himself. God must be presupposed in order for reason to work.

Now that doesn't get you all the way to Christianity since Christianity is only one of thousands of theistic worldviews but establishing Christianity would be far outside the bounds of what I'm trying to establish in this thread. It would, however, be worth my time, I think, to point out that the God of the Bible, and Jesus in particular, is presented to us as Reason incarnate. Note the following passage from the first chapter of John's Gospel...


In this passage, everywhere you see the phrase, "the Word" the Greek word being used is "Logos". It is important to understand what this Greek word means because the use of "Word" as an English translation just doesn't convey what this passage is teaching. Logos conveys the idea of communication or more specifically, discourse and more specifically than that, rational discourse and/or rational argument. It is the word from which we get the suffix "-ology", as in Biology, Theology, Technology, Climatology, Cosmology, etc. So, the study of living things is "Biology" and the processes in a living creature are said to be biological. Notice bio-LOGICAL. To apply logic to the processes in living things, and thus to understand them, is biology, it is the logos of life. This is the meaning conveyed by "Logos".

So now, with this better understanding of the Greek, lets look at this passage again...
Now, to be clear, I should point out that I do not worship logic except in the specific sense present above. The bible repeatedly tells us that God is Love and no one has any problem with accepting that notion and no one is every accused of worshiping love except in the sense that God is Love and we do worship God. In the same sense that God is Love, God is also Logic and I worship Him as such. I do not worship the process of right thinking, I worship Him from whom that process emanates and derives its meaning and veracity.

For this reason, and several others, Christianity is not only a rational worldview, it is the only rational worldview. That is not to say that everything claimed by unbelievers is false. If the God of the bible is Reason, then the closer an unbeliever comes to having reason as his foundation and the more consistently he uses logic correctly, the closer his conclusions will come to the truth and the more in agreement his "true science" will be with "true religion". The problem is, as I've been attempting to show you here in this thread, they neither have reason as their foundation nor do they use logic consistently. Their paradigm steers them away from the truth because they, in spite of their claims to the contrary, do not merely reject God's existence. On the contrary, they despise the very idea of God and are enemies of those who believe in God, most especially Christians. You would be wise to count them as the enemies that they are.

Resting in Him,
Clete

iouae said:

As I understand Einstein, he said that the speed of light (c) is constant for every observer.
Time speeds up, or slows down to accommodate the fact that the speed of light is constant.

If c is constant, which all reputable science has proved it is, then my post above on a telescope being an accurate time machine, is true. I have never heard an astronomer or cosmologist say otherwise.

I say that religious folks don't need to fight scientific fact that the universe is ancient.
Religious folks must instead look to themselves, and acknowledge that they are wrong in their interpretation of scripture. Scripture nowhere says how old the universe is. Bishop Usher and those counting the "begats" mistakenly thing that Genesis 1 is describing the original formation of earth. Its not. Its describing the replenishing of earth after a mass extinction.

To give but one "proof". Earth is full of igneous rock, or rock formed under fire.
Nowhere in Genesis or the last 6000 years has earth been subjected to large-scale fire, except in a few volcanoes, which produce igneous rock or lava.

Science explains that earth was originally a molten ball which slowly cooled down over 4.5 billion years. That's where so much igneous rock comes from.

Thank God we live in an age when "knowledge shall be increased" when we can know so much, including about the origin of the universe. With a big enough telescope, we will almost be able to see how, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

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I think you simply missed the point.

Whenever you try to step into the past you have to assume that c is no longer a constant, because you have to assume that time is a constant instead. That's what I meant that whenever you try to study the past, you have to assume that time is a constant (instead of c) to do your speculations.

Moreover, it is not about the limitation of science. It's rather about how a truth can be identified reliably. Science in a nutshell, it's the making use of prediction to confirm a truth. Your way mentioned here is speculation instead of science in a stricter sense. That's where the accuracy of science is coming from. You have to give this accuracy up whenever stepping into researching the past.

Clete said:

The atheistic worldview is predicated on the idea that nothing is to be taken by faith. This is their most fundamental philosophical pillar.
Clete

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Your opening statement, the foundation of your argument, is utterly false.

Atheists have faith, just as Christians have. They have the faith to travel on a plane, piloted by some unknown pilot, a plane who's maintenance they have no clue about.

My Dad was an atheist who had more faith in evolution than most Christians have in Christ.

Atheists cross the road in front of someone who waves them to cross, with faith that person has no ill intent.

Atheists have operations, believing in the surgeon. Atheists climb mountains, having faith in their ropes.

It's not the just alone who live by faith. All do.
The just, just live by faith in Christ.

Therefore the rest of your argument, hard as it is to understand, seems to fall.

Hawkins said:

I think you simply missed the point.

Whenever you try to step into the past you have to assume that c is no longer a constant, because you have to assume that time is a constant instead. That's what I meant that whenever you try to study the past, you have to assume that time is a constant (instead of c) to do your speculations.

Click to expand...

Time IS a constant from the point of view of earth.

Only if earth fell into a black hole would time slow down significantly enough to affect time.

Since that has not happened, since we are still here, for all intents and purposes, time on earth is constant.
And no (reputable) science has ever suggested (to my knowledge) that light has sped up or slowed down travelling through space, since the heavens began.

iouae said:

Your opening statement, the foundation of your argument, is utterly false.

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As if I'm the one who came up with the Transcendental argument for the existence of God. This argument is about as famous as it gets in theological/philosophical circles. Guess what is NOT accepted as a valid refutation of the argument - the denial of the opening premise.

Now, I wrote that from memory and so don't claim to have worded it as well as some could have but if you're going to deny the veracity of the TAG, you'll have to do far better than to deny that the atheist worldview is predicated on the idea that nothing is to be taken on faith.

Atheists have faith, just as Christians have.

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This is why the TAG works. They can't help it but their worldview is predicated against it. It is an inherent and unavoidable contradiction and proof that their worldview is false.

They have the faith to travel on a plane, piloted by some unknown pilot, a plane who's maintenance they have no clue about.

My Dad was an atheist who had more faith in evolution than most Christians have in Christ.

Atheists cross the road in front of someone who waves them to cross, with faith that person has no ill intent.

Atheists have operations, believing in the surgeon. Atheists climb mountains, having faith in their ropes.

It's not the just alone who live by faith. All do.
The just, just live by faith in Christ.

Therefore the rest of your argument, hard as it is to understand, seems to fall.

Click to expand...

None of this is the sort of faith that atheists reject. This does happen to have a great deal to do with what the bible is referring to when it talks about faith but, for the purposes of the TAG, faith means belief in the absence of evidence.

What's hard to understand about it? The atheist's worldview rejects faith but atheists are required to use it anyway. Their practice MUST contradict their worldview. Their worldview is therefore false. If atheism is rationally impossible then theism must be true. Therefore, God exists because of the rational impossibility of the contrary. Simple!

The point is that the biblical worldview does not make an argument for the existence of God, it presupposes the existence of God. The bible just starts with telling you what God has always existed and is written on that premise. It doesn't argue for His existence. This is a critical point because to BEGIN with an argument for God's existence places reason as the foundation which is backward. It is God Himself who is the foundation, for reason (i.e. He is Reason), not the other way around. Christianity is the only worldview I know of that acknowledges this which is sufficient, by itself, to establish Christianity as the only truly consistent, rational worldview in existence.

So what's the point in the context of this discussion?

The point is, very simply, that the atheists are forced to borrow from OUR worldview in order to open their mouths. Their every word is predicated on that which defeats their very existence as atheists. WHY OH WHY would you want to give up that rock solid philosophical ground to the point of completely flipping that around by rejecting what the bible CLEARLY teaches in order to grab, borrow, beg and steal ideas that are predicated on the shifting sands of their false premises?

There is tons more that today's science doesn't know than what they do; there's way more that they can't explain than what they can. 99% of modern cosmology is THEORY - not fact; theory based on mathematics - not physics. You have placed you faith into people who have not earned it and do not deserve it, neither on scientific nor philosophical grounds.

Resting in Him,
Clete

iouae said:

Time IS a constant from the point of view of earth.

Only if earth fell into a black hole would time slow down significantly enough to affect time.

Since that has not happened, since we are still here, for all intents and purposes, time on earth is constant.
And no (reputable) science has ever suggested (to my knowledge) that light has sped up or slowed down travelling through space, since the heavens began.

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Actually, before they started using light to measure time (atomic clocks) the belief in a decaying speed of light was wide spread. Now, since they use light as the measuring stick for clocks, any variation in it's speed would be impossible to detect because a slower speed of light translates into a slower 'second hand' on the clock face resulting in an identical speed measurement. In other words, atomic clocks detect the radiation that is produced by Ceasium-133 atoms as they fluctuate between two states. This frequency of this fluctuation is dependent on value of C and is only thought to be constant (given a specific set of conditions) because C is thought to be constant. There are other forms of hyper accurate clocks but that are all dependent, in one form or another, on very precise detection of specific frequencies of light. So long as it is atomic or optical clocks doing the measurement, C will forever be perceived to be rock solid, whether it actually is or not.

Now, that's not to say that there aren't work-arounds for this problem. There are, but they are generally not employed because everyone "knows" that the speed of light is constant.

Also, you're wrong on another point in your short post. There are very reputable (i.e. atheistic - secular) scientists who question the constancy of the speed of light. There was a paper publish in November of 2016 on just that topic. The link below is to an article that details the argument and the problem it is intended to solve...

Scientists Think the Speed of Light Has Slowed, and They're Trying to Prove It



Of course, the idea of a decaying value of c is common in Christian circles. Personally, I haven't studied the problem enough to have formed my own verdict on it but I am open minded enough to acknowledge there are good arguments on both sides of the issue. The two articles below are both published on Christian, young-Earth websites. They are both discussing the same science done by the same scientists. One is supportive the other not.

https://creation.com/speed-of-light-slowing-down-after-all

http://www.icr.org/article/has-speed-light-decayed/

The point here being that the idea of a decaying speed of light is not so outrageous as you pretend. It is, in fact, yet another example of your implicit trust of atheistic science.


Clete

Clete said:

What's hard to understand about it? The atheist's worldview rejects faith but atheists are required to use it anyway. Their practice MUST contradict their worldview. Their worldview is therefore false. If atheism is rationally impossible then theism must be true. Therefore, God exists because of the rational impossibility of the contrary. Simple!

Clete

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Crete, the above logic is completely flawed.

First, the proof of the existence of God depends on the "atheists worldview".

This is so obviously wrong. The existence of God does not depend on either the atheists, or believer's worldview.

What humans believe, whether atheist or theist, does not affect what really IS.

Faith is not unique to the religious community. Faith is universal. Even animals have faith.

A wolf would not go hunting if it did not have faith that by randomly running about, it is likely to come upon a deer.
And the same wolf would not tackle the much bigger deer if it did not have faith it could bring the deer down. Logic may tell it that it should hide from this much bigger deer.

And what goes on in the deer's head, does not affect whether there is a God or not.
Likewise what goes on in an atheist's head has zero ability to prove or disprove the existence of God.

Atheists believe the sun will rise tomorrow.
Atheists believe they will be paid at the end of the month.
Atheist's daughters believe that Daddy will catch them if the jump towards his arms.

Nothing anyone/anything believes can ever affect reality (the Truth on the ground).

iouae said:

Crete, the above logic is completely flawed.

First, the proof of the existence of God depends on the "atheists worldview".

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No it doesn't! It's just the opposite. The proof is that the atheists worldview is unavoidably self-contradictory which falsifies their worldview by their own standard.
The argument uses reason, which Christian can use without contradicting their own worldview, to demonstrate that the atheist cannot do the same. It's flawlessly brilliant and has been accepted as such for decades.

Look, I'm not kidding. This is not MY argument. This argument has been around for decades and far greater minds than either you or I haven't found it to be "completely flawed" as you have summarily declared it to be. In fact, the most common objection to it has to do with the fact that it usually used by Christians and the atheist that they are debating points out that the argument, by itself, doesn't support Christianity per se but rather theism in general. That, however, isn't a problem since falsifying atheism is all it is intended to do. I mean, if you're debating an atheist and you prove that his worldview is forced to falsify itself by it own standards, you've won the debate, no matter what religion you believe in.

This is so obviously wrong. The existence of God does not depend on either the atheists, or believer's worldview.

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No one but you has suggested otherwise.

All that has been shown is that any worldview that is self-stultifying is false and that if there is but one alternative, that alternative must be the truth. To quote a fictional character...

"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

What humans believe, whether atheist or theist, does not affect what really IS.

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NO ONE has suggested otherwise! If you think I have, you have totally misunderstood what is a very simple argument.

Faith is not unique to the religious community. Faith is universal. Even animals have faith.

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This was a stupid thing to say.

A wolf would not go hunting if it did not have faith that by randomly running about, it is likely to come upon a deer.
And the same wolf would not tackle the much bigger deer if it did not have faith it could bring the deer down. Logic may tell it that it should hide from this much bigger deer.

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Instinct is NOT faith in the sense that atheists reject.

And, as you seem prone to do, you entirely ignored the totally clear definition of faith which I stated in my last post. The sort of thing you are talking about here is not the sort of faith that atheists reject. The faith they reject is defined as "belief without (or in sprite of) evidence".

Learned behavior, such as wild animals hunting or people crossing bridges is NOT what is being discussed here, nor is the instinctive responses deer have to seeing predators. The atheist worldview is predicated on the rejection of believing in something without evidence. For the atheist, evidence comes first then belief - except that it doesn't - which is the point of the argument.

Nothing anyone/anything believes can ever affect reality (the Truth on the ground).

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If you'd bother to read my posts and try at all to understand them rather than looking for any reason you can dream up to disagree with, and if you'd had spent more than thirty minutes of your whole life studying philosophy, you'd know that this is nothing at all but a restatement of something I've already said and which philosophers have known for 4000 years. It is the law of identity. What is, is. A is A. It makes no difference what anyone thinks about it, it makes no difference if anyone even knows about it. All it depends on it the truth of it's existence. This is the fundamental law of all thought, all understanding, all study, all communication, all meaning of any kind in any context whatsoever. Even the other two laws of reason are corollaries of the law of identity.

What the atheist cannot do is answer the question, "What gives the law of identity its meaning?". Any answer they attempt to give will use the law of identity to pronounce the first syllable of their argument. Their argument, therefore, assumes the truth of that which they are attempting to prove which is the exact definition of begging the question. "Question begging", by the way, has nothing to do with some point implying a next question, which is how the phrase is almost always used on television and in popular culture. What it actually refers to is a logical fallacy. It is a specific form of circular reasoning and it is irrational. It is also unavoidable from withing the atheist's worldview - utterly - totally - and in all other ways - UNAVOIDABLE. Atheism is therefore false. Theism, the only alternative to atheism, is therefore true.

Now, that is a perfectly valid argument but don't make the mistake, which you clearly have, of assuming that this argument is what Christianity is based on. It isn't. As I said in my previous post, Christianity (and Judaism - i.e. the biblical worldview) does NOT make an argument for God. Christians can make such arguments but those arguments are not the foundation of Christianity and Christianity itself, as a worldview, does not begin with, nor is it predicated on an argument for God's existence. On the contrary, it begins from God and understands that rationality itself is predicated on God's existence. The book of John goes so far as to equate God the Son with Reason and states explicitly that Jesus is Logic (Reason) incarnate.

Clete

Clete said:

Atheism is therefore false. Theism, the only alternative to atheism, is therefore true.

Clete

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Clete To pick on what I perceive to be the central tenant of your argument....

I can think of plenty of other alternatives to atheism.

Atheism noun
disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.

Almost anything can be an alternative to this.
disbelief or lack of belief in their being life out there.
disbelief in the tooth fairy.
belief in the tooth fairy.

The definition of "atheism" has two elements viz. "disbelief" and "god/s".
Change any one of these words and one has an alternative to atheism.

Sorry, I am not skilled in philosophy, so I am unmoved by these ancient wisdoms.

And let's suppose the opposite of black is white.
If something is not black, that does not make it white. It could be green or red or blue or....

Just because a concept has an opposite, does not mean if one does not have that concept (atheism), one automatically has the opposite.

iouae said:

Empirical data is produced by experiment and observation.

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You are confusing evidence / data with interpretations. Everyone works with, or observes the same evidence.

iouae said:

Science specialises in finding things we cannot see with our usual senses. we see distant galaxies. We see quarks and subatomic particles, and gravity waves and... and...

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[MENTION=2589]Clete[/MENTION] answered.

iouae said:

A telescope is a time machine which we can use to see into the past, with our own eyes, for a few $.Turns out we can see pretty far into the past.

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You are confusing distance with time. A 2 part question for you... a) According to Einstein what is the one way speed of light? b) At what speed did God spread the stars / 'stretch the heavens'?

6days said:

You are confusing distance with time. A 2 part question for you... a) According to Einstein what is the one way speed of light? b) At what speed did God spread the stars / 'stretch the heavens'?

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a)The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted c, is a universal physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its exact value is299,792,458 metres per second (approximately3.00×108 m/s, or 300,000 km/s (186,000 mi/s)).
When using the term 'the speed of light' it is sometimes necessary to make the distinction between its one-way speed and its two-way speed. The "one-way" speed of light from a source to a detector, cannot be measured independently of a convention as to how to synchronize the clocks at the source and the detector. What can however be experimentally measured is the round-trip speed (or "two-way" speed of light) from the source to the detector and back again. Albert Einstein chose a synchronization convention (see Einstein synchronization) that made the one-way speed equal to the two-way speed. The constancy of the one-way speed in any given inertial frame is the basis of his special theory of relativity, although all experimentally verifiable predictions of this theory do not depend on that convention.[1][2]

Experiments that attempted to directly probe the one-way speed of light independent of synchronization have been proposed, but none has succeeded in doing so.[3] Those experiments directly establish that synchronization with slow clock-transport is equivalent to Einstein synchronization, which is an important feature of special relativity. Though those experiments don't directly establish the isotropy of the one-way speed of light, because it was shown that slow clock-transport, the laws of motion, and the way inertial reference frames are defined, already involve the assumption of isotropic one-way speeds and thus are conventional as well.[4] In general, it was shown that these experiments are consistent with anisotropic one-way light speed as long as the two-way light speed is isotropic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light

b) 68 kilometers per second per megaparsec where one megaparsecond is a distance: One megaparsec is 1 million parsec, which is 3.26 million light-years

iouae said:

a)The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted c, is .

..

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A a simple and truthful answer to both questions would be "I don't know."


Did God create the one way speed of light as an infinite?... We don't know. Was the speed of light faster in the past? We don't know...( there are secular scientists who speculate that the speed of light may have been trillions of times faster in the past). Did God take an hour to spread galaxies 14 billion light years away? We don't know how long it took him to spread the stars (it likely was in an instant).

IOW... distance in light years and the amount of time are two different things... It is wrong to try insert secular ideas into God's Word, in your attempts to prove His Word incorrect.

6days said:

A a simple and truthful answer to both questions would be "I don't know."

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Not if you were me.

Did God create the one way speed of light as an infinite?... We don't know. Was the speed of light faster in the past? We don't know...( there are secular scientists who speculate that the speed of light may have been trillions of times faster in the past). Did God take an hour to spread galaxies 14 billion light years away? We don't know how long it took him to spread the stars (it likely was in an instant).

Click to expand...

I don't think things are as confusing as you want them to be.

IOW... distance in light years and the amount of time are two different things... It is wrong to try insert secular ideas into God's Word, in your attempts to prove His Word incorrect.

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Light years are distances. I don't see why they are secular.

iouae said:

Clete To pick on what I perceive to be the central tenant of your argument....

I can think of plenty of other alternatives to atheism.

Atheism noun
disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.

Almost anything can be an alternative to this.
disbelief or lack of belief in their being life out there.
disbelief in the tooth fairy.
belief in the tooth fairy.

The definition of "atheism" has two elements viz. "disbelief" and "god/s".
Change any one of these words and one has an alternative to atheism.

Sorry, I am not skilled in philosophy, so I am unmoved by these ancient wisdoms.

And let's suppose the opposite of black is white.
If something is not black, that does not make it white. It could be green or red or blue or....

Just because a concept has an opposite, does not mean if one does not have that concept (atheism), one automatically has the opposite.

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Your post violates the law of excluded middle.

Truth claim: God exist.

That claim is either true or it is false - period. There is no third (or forth of fifth) option as you'd have with a concept such as color. The presence or absense of light would be a better analogy. There is either light present or not. If there is light then you can discuss what color it is and how bright it is and if there is more than one source but those are ancillary to whether the light exists.

If God exists then theism is true and atheism is false and vice versa. The TAG does not touch ancillary issues such as polytheism vs. monotheism or whether God is relational or impassible or moral or amoral.

Clete

iouae said:

a)The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted c, is a universal physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its exact value is299,792,458 metres per second (approximately3.00×108 m/s, or 300,000 km/s (186,000 mi/s)).

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I'm curious to know whether you realize that the meter is now defined as 1/299,792,458th of the distance that light travels through a vacuum in one second.

So what? You ask!

Well, if the speed of light was actually changing and the meter is defined by the distance light travels in a given period of time (i.e. by the speed of light) then the meter would change with the change in c and thereby maintain the same speed measurement.

So, not only is the second is based on the speed of light, as I mention in a previous post, but also the meter is based on the speed of light. But speed is just a measure of distance over time and so you have the speed of light defined by terms that are themselves defined by the speed of light. The wheels on the bus go round and round!

This sort of circularity is all through physics and is widely known and admitted and no one cares because, once again, everyone "knows" that c is a constant.

iouae said:

6days said:

a simple and truthful answer to both questions would be "I don't know."

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Not if you were me.

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I said a truthful answer. Funny that no one on earth..... other than you knows how fast God spread the stars... or, the one way speed of light.

iouae said:

Light years are distances.

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Very good... light years has nothing to do with the age of the universe, contrary to what you said before.

iouae said:

I don't see why (light years) are secular.

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Nobody said such a thing. What I did say is "It is wrong to try insert secular ideas into God's Word, in your attempts to prove His Word incorrect."