You can take it that way if you wish, you would be misunderstanding me to do so.
Let me ask you a few straight questions and see if you can just answer them without trying to argue a separate point:

Do you agree that in order to understand an old piece of writing (whether biblical or not), you need to understand the culture and the way language was used (and the way history was recorded) at the time? (If not, why not?)

Do you agree that a metaphor is a reasonable linguistic tool to use in any given culture? (If not, why not?)

Do you agree that IF God exists, the arguments against resurrection etc, fall away? (If not, why not?)

I'm not using these as arguments FOR the existence of God - merely dealing with a point in the present discussion.

As for "If god is all powerful, outside of time, etc. It's supernatural. " -> you're arguing with DrYaboll there, not me. (I was merely agreeing with him that if something is possible, it must be natural, in one definition of the word natural. I've no problem with God being considered supernatural from the point of view of being beyond our understanding and outside the laws of our universe).

That's completely irrelevant. Because you believe that a diety had to be at the beginning of everything, doesn't mean everybody does - your belief doesn't make everybody a theist.

OR they was no evidence to begin with and the Christians in power, did not like this so they decided to create evidence by rewriting all the texts they found from around the time, Christians say Jesus existed. Planting archaeological evidence is more likely to get you caught and a lot harder to do so that doesn't seem like an option to me.

Why does it matter, even if none of the current explanations are right, it does not mean that any god idea is more true. Would anyone stop being a scientologist or christian if tomorrow we discover exactly what is outside our universe? Did anyone stop being a christian when they found out the world isn't flat? Did Bill o'Reilly stop being religious when he found what causes tides? No, they will just shift the problem to the next level, what is outside of what is outside our universe? What caused whatever caused that? I don't see how any of this makes religions more useful or gods more likely.


That makes no sense at all. Science means knowledge gained from testable explanations by using the scientific method. It is a tool, not a belief system. You can use the scientific method for all kinds of things, you can use it to find out how your favourite computer game really works. It has nothing to do with religion, which is blind faith.

I'm not a cosmologist but they have started to look at 'nothing' in space and found that it is actually pretty active. Something ridiculous like 90% of our body's mass comes from the empty bits inside of protons. The nothing before the Big Bang was supposedly quite active, and at a quantum level you can get something from nothing.

This videos explains it way better than I could hope to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo (Beware, the video is full of religious sniping so try not to be offended. The information is good but unfortunately the speaker will alienate most religious people.)

Without having time to look at the video but knowing how this debate usually pans out, my guess is that this would operate on a different definition of "nothing". Some cosmologists will use the word "nothing" to describe empty space, but philosophically nothing is the absence of anything at all. It'll obviously be a problem if you conflate the two.

To Soyeong- I see you quoted Feser earlier in this thread. Did you see he has a new book on Scholastic Metaphysics coming out in a few months? It looks absolutely amazing.

I actually always found this discussion simple enough: We don't know. We don't even know if Big Bang was a thing for sure, and if it was, how exactly it worked. We, quite simply, don't have enough information, so the debate becomes pretty much philosophical in nature. When it comes to the creation of cosmos, we're about at the level of knowledge of how much our distant ancestors knew of how does a lightening form - to me, it only seems fitting we will attemt to fill the gaps by a god, just as they did.

I am watching it, very fascinating. It is not a definition thing. Apparently there is no nothing. What we so far thought of as nothing is something we just can not observe directly, yet.
Kind of like in the stone age they probably called air nothing.

I have solution to this conflict that will please everyone, I think. How about everyone just worships the monkey in the pic I use as my avatar? We can build a giant statue of him and then make sacrifices before it. The angry monkey demands it!

In the beginning, there was nothing so the angry monkey was bored. The angry monkey, decided to create the universe the way it is, today. He started flinging poo in every direction. The poo became planets and stars... But the angry monkey was still bored...and lonely so he decided to create life. So again, he started flinging poo in every direction and that poo became the animals in the sea , on land and in the sky. Some of that poo also became plants. But this was not enough. The angry monkey felt he could do better so again he did some more poo flinging and created humans. So it came to pass, that the human race started populating most of the Earth and the angry monkey looked down upon his new dominion, as Master of all. And I thought it... good.

There's more evidence for that monkey than for Jesus. :)

Logic is not the be all, end all of determining truth. But whatever...

If the finite universe is what prevented you from admiting the logical validity of the atheist position, let's rephrase the question:
Do you admit it is possible, even if you believe it to be false, for the universe to have existed eternally without an external will existing?

Onwards to ontology. Spontaneous emergence from nothing is only impossible according to assumptions you are not postulating. Do ellaborate on the logical argumentation you see that proves or disproves either of the following metaphysical absolutes:
A: From nothing nothing comes
B: From nothing everything comes

And for fun a parting salute, if the concept of infinite is not real, what caused it? :)

You said that an idea of God requires intent and I argued that it does have intent. It's not that I believe these things to be true, but that the arguments show that it is logically necessary to be true. I never claimed that that something being logically necessary means that everyone is required to think that it is true.

As I quoted earlier, claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. It's not good enough just to claim that that it's possible to have happened, you need to show your evidence that it did. Show me your evidence for when Christianity started, the social framework at the time, and the reasons for why someone would choose to believe all of these things about someone they had never heard of. They were just as familiar that corpses tended to stay dead as we are, so they would just as readily reject the idea that that someone rose from the dead.

It's reasonable to speculate that someone in power altered some manuscripts, but it's not reasonable to claim that to be the case without providing evidence that it is true. The effort involved in finding all of the manuscripts would have been enormous, and it is far more likely that there would have been manuscripts hidden away that escaped their reach. Findings like the Dead Sea scrolls have been critically important in showing that earlier manuscripts are very close to later manuscripts, so the idea that they were rewritten to suit the needs of those in power is simply unfounded.

Do you have access to information that no scientist in the world, either religious or non-religious, has? I know you don't, I just want to point out that what you're saying is utterly ridiculous. Many more people who were far smarter than you were exploring the subject, claiming that conclusion which you and mr. Craig came up with is the only logical explanation of creation of the universe is just ... I don't have words for how arrogant that is.