I agree with the first sentence, but you cannot deny the fact that without being threatened with hell. A lot of the religious wouldn't care to be moral what so ever. Morals are our own personal opinions, and that of our societies, not handed down to us by an imagined god.

If you think I have ignored anything or that I don't understand anything, then please bring up. Conversely, he clearly has not put much effort into understanding why Christians believe or into understanding WLC's arguments.

"I agree with the first sentence, but you cannot deny the fact that without being threatened with hell. A lot of the religious wouldn't care to be moral what so ever. Morals are our own personal opinions, and that of our societies, not handed down to us by an imagined god."

And again, I've read what been linked, but he simply goes on ignoring what I've posted.
I wouldn't live any differently if heaven or hell didn't exist. Heaven and hell are pretty much people getting what they want. It's nice to see that you've continued to ignore what I've linked though.

You ignored mine also, pot and kettle.

If said I watched it. If you think a society governed by secular humanism would be immune to the same lust for money, power, and the corruption that is found everywhere else, then I have bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. But, I can see there is no penetrating our invincible wall of ignorance. And I do hope you realize by using that expression, you'd admitting to blindly dismissing everything you don't agree with without bothering to understand it. I'll also reiterate that I'd be happy to address anything you think I've ignored.

Claims without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Science has it's foundation in philosophy. The multiverse is a possible explanation, but there is no evidence for it and no logical necessity, so it doesn't hold any weight. It still runs into the same problems, so all it does is push everything back one step.

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/multiverse-and-the-design-argument The idea that faith is rational goes back thousands of years, whereas the idea that faith isn't rational is a recent phenomenon that is generally pushed by people who don't understand what faith means. For instance, look at the Greek word "pistis" or the Hebrew word "emunah".
FYI, that's not an excuse to ignore evidence or arguments. In case you'd rather read it:

1. The Law of Human Nature

Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?"-"That's my seat, I was there first"-"Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm"- "Why should you shove in first?"-"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"-"Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups. Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: "To hell with your standard." Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the "laws of nature" we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong "the Law of Nature," they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law-with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.

We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he
chooses.

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.

I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to-whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining "It's not fair" before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not matter, but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong- in other words, if there is no Law of Nature-what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?

It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologise to them. They had much better read some other work, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:

I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money-the one you have almost forgotten-came when you were very hard up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have never done-well, you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behaviour to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it-and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much-we feel the Rule or Law pressing on us so- that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

http://lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt

Too many pages.

Science has it's foundation in philosophy.

Yes, also in theology (scientists hate this lol) but that wasn't my point. You can trace the roots of science to various disciplines but it does not operate on them. Science is observational. For example, gravity will not change in behavior regardless of the philosophical or religious views of the observer.

The multiverse is a possible explanation, but there is no evidence for it and no logical necessity, so it doesn't hold any weight. It still runs into the same problems, so all it does is push everything back one step.

Again this is misleading. The multiverse just solves a mathematical quirk and is based on a simple observation, our universe (we assume) exists. If one universe exists are there any limits regarding other universes existing? (not as a rhetorical question) Our universe is evidence that a universe can exist. As to the issue of "logical necessity." It is actually because of logical necessity that theories such as the mutliverse are being proposed. Again, it solves a mathematical quirk relating to the laws that govern our universe.

As I understand it, cosmologists are not pushing multiverse theory as fact, it is just one potential solution. However, that one idea seems to be misrepresented by theologians quite often, at times to imply hipocracy.

The idea that faith is rational goes back thousands of years, whereas the idea that faith isn't rational is a recent phenomenon that is generally pushed by people who don't understand what faith means. For instance, look at the Greek word "pistis" or the Hebrew word "emunah".

On one level, of course faith would seem rational thousands of years ago, this was the period where faith explained existence. In modern times science fills that need so faith seems unrational. My point however wasn't on the use of the word or even if faith is rational or not. Simply, it honestly doesn't matter. Religious people are quite capable of accepting scientific findings regardless of the implications since God exists outside of our experience. The recent revival of apologetics is ultimately unnecessary, they don't need to explain their faith.

So this bit about the law of nature and how it determines that we must have had a Creator who gave us this law? It ignores a few very fundamental traits about pack behavior: the same trends that we see in human behavior are visible in any social animal. The fact that we as a society reward those who are valorous, or honest, strong, or kind all come from the fact that these traits are advantageous to the survival of the species over the survival of the individual. That's an evolutionary pressure, and if you think that evolution doesn't shape society in the same manner that it shapes an organism, you haven't been paying attention.

EDIT: Forgot a point about this. Balls. The reason why humans know the "laws of nature" and then disobey them isn't because we were created with the divine knowledge of these rules and, as flawed and sinful beings we are lead astray by the Devil to break these laws. The reason is that the "laws of nature" are laws that act in the best interest of the survival of the tribe, and being selfish--acting in the best interests of the survival of the individual--is the eternal war inherent in the nature of an animal that is trying to be part of society.

On a seperate topic: A lot of people in this thread have been saying that they don't need to argue with you because your claims are bunk. Their arguement is bad and they should feel bad. Let me rather say that I watched this and it seems to me like much of Mr. Ham's refutations are based on bad science. I would say that my main argument with Mr. Ham's deconstruction of science is that he creates a false divide between "observational science" and "historical science". There isn't one, and by claiming that there is, he is creating a system whereby he can dismiss science that is inconvenient to him without actual cause. Saying that we can't know what happened if no one was there to directly observe it is like saying that when a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, we should infer that it fell silently. It requires that at some point in history, cause no longer leads to effect. That's crazy talk.

It is possible to historically date via a variety of scientific methods items that are young enough that they exist within our written record. There are many relics of civilizations that date from biblical times which we can reliably with science say, "Yes, this matches the biblical record". That is to say, we have a cause (let's say radio carbon decay, although that's not the most accurate of methods) and an effect (we can determine how much it has decayed through time). And then when we say, "we have used the same science that reliably dates things from biblical times to reliably date things from 250,000 years ago" the evidence strongly suggests that the same cause leads to the same effect. By saying that some of this science is observational and as such reliable and some is historic and, as sich, debatable, you're ignoring some of the fundamental underpinnings of science.

Yes, so what? That is not our problem. We are not the ones who claim there is some eternal "non being" or whatever. We just try to find out what is. It doesn't matter to us if it is not the last in a long chain. Science is not done to disprove god, despite of what you might think.

What is your point, tradition over progress? You know that democracy is a recent phenomenon that is generally pushed by people who don't understand what feudalism means. (yes this makes no sense, justlike your sentence)

Why is that a problem? That is just reality, you not liking it, doesn't make it untrue. There are many societies that considered horrible things to be moral. There are societies who consider it moral to murder your sister if she messes around with foreign men today! Morality is relative to your standpoint, even if you don't like that.

Err that is the exact opposite of "ergo", more like nogo. Don't you realise the problems there? You can only prove that someone said those things. Proving that he is a god is a different proof.

I replied to them, it didn't seem to interest you. What does pimpmonkey have, that I don't have? *whine*

Not eating swine, not getting tattoos, not shaving, you know things even christians can laugh at.

Yes but you described a different fallacy which has nothing to do with what he said.

But you see, philosophers aren't crazy people, they do try to base their stuff on actual science of their time. And up to recently the nothing we now think is something was really regarded as nothing. You now imagining some real nothing somewhere else has no basis in reality. There is no reason to assume there is some real nothing or non being somewhere out there.

What?

Well then I'll let lawrence krauss speak for me. :)

Next, if one is going to frame the argument scientifically, as I argued is essential when discussing empirical evidence, which Craig later took great pains to disavow, one must point out that in science when one is trying to explain and predict data, one tries to explore all possible physical causes for some effect before resorting to the supernatural. Happily it is precisely this progress in our natural philosophy that ended such religious atrocities as the burning of witches. In each and every case the actual syllogism that one ended up with was:

1. Craig either doesn’t understand how something could happen, or instead believes that events happened that confirmed his pre-existing belief system.
2. In the absence of understanding physical causes or exploring alternatives, this implies evidence for the existence of God.
3. Therefore there is evidence that God exists.

This is what I framed as the “God of the Gaps” argument and I continue to view, upon reflection, most of the claims of Craig as falling in this well-known theological trap.

Most Christians are very committed to their faith not because of a scientific explanation about God, but because at some point in their life, they took a leap of faith and their entire world changed. They found themselves empowered to break many of their chains of sin, they find an understanding of the entire world that seems to make sense and they begin to understand how powerful love is.

It starts there and moves to the Bible. A Christian will read their Bible, feel connected to God and the world makes even more sense. They will test and challenge the Bible and the Bible repeatedly comes back true. Promises in the Bible are lived out over a period of a few years that the Christian cannot explain and the reality of God really sets in.

Over some time, a Christian will look at the Genesis story and try to reconcile it with their observations. Everyone comes at it from a different perspective. Some are science-minded. Some are actual scientists (I'd image there's at least one evolutionary biologist). Some from a literary, historical or philosophical angle. And people try to grasp what that story means.

Some try to find holes wide enough for their faith in current scientific understandings. Old Earth/Old Universe/Big Bang was actually developed by a Christian who wanted to prove out that God still could have made it all in an instant. Some say God-guided evolution. Some say evolution is crap. Some say young earth, some old earth. But where they start is the Bible's text. Then they have to make decisions about any kind of literary devices used in Genesis. Is the story supposed to be literal? How can it be? But what sort of meaning to inerrancy is implied if it's not literal? These are the questions a Christian asks. And those questions inform their views of the science (one particular branch, anyway).

Science is not just led by experimentation and observation. In the past few centuries, a lot has been led by religion (look at the above Big Bang mention). We sometimes have a gut instinct, a religious tip or a question we're dying to answer. Then we start observing, hypothesizing, testing and retesting and trying to find a solution.

The function of science is static, but the results are chaotically dynamic. Eggs are good for you. No, bad. No, good. Bad! Good! Science is great for finding answers, but mankind has always needed more answers than only science could provide. Religion is one method people use to figure out their world outside of science. For many, they believe it's the only true way to know the world.

Even non-religious scientists use a coping method. Perhaps trusting what their parents told them, delving into philosophy or even living in an unbalanced, regularly changing world and relishing the chaos.

If you want to argue science with a Christian, you can. Both parties will have read different people and everyone will come with a strong opinion. Holes are poked into theories back and forth (often with misinformation from both parties -- the above few pages are filled on both sides with misunderstandings of topics and concepts), but at the end of the day, usually little has changed. Perhaps because we're making the wrong argument.

You can't take away that fundamental starting point in a Christian's journey and they can't force you to experience it. And that is the hinging point on a lot of the evolution discussion. It's that initial spark that makes a Christian's eye turn toward other data.

I disagreed with Bill Nye's closing statements. He was afraid that the lack of evolution-teaching was making America weak. I work with a ton of science-minded people. Have for all my life. And so far, none of them have relied on an understanding of evolution to do their work. In fact, evolution can sometimes get in the way if you try to over-think physiology.

What I find terribly disturbing are rotten and vicious attacks made against both sides of the aisle. I was very impressed that Bill Nye and Mr. Ham and, for the most part, the community engaging in this thread have tried to be civil and caring. I understand that evolutionists want non-evolutionists to know the truth. And vice versa. And that passion should be rooted in a mutual love for one another and not pride. When we care for one another and we still find ourselves in disagreement, we can still enjoy a cup of tea at the end of the day and enjoy conversations about far more important and compelling topics.

But what I don't get is why you guys need another explanation. If we can't explain something yet, why make something supernatural up? That makes no sense and only stands in the way of finding the real explanation. A god for gaps is not necessary or useful.