for those that believe in god

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It specifically says the smell. I mean, I don't know what that smells like, but it is still funny. I dunno, I just think that if I was an all powerful creator of the universe, I wouldn't be hounding this random group of middle-eastern people to burn goat fat for me because I like the smell.

The human thing really isn't though because human beings are beings of flesh with fleshly needs, and this includes energy.

It all depends upon how you phrase your jokes as to whether they are humorous or flat. You phrased your joke in a funny manner, admittedly. But finding something humorous isn't the same as invalidating it. What if God really did enjoy the actual smell of aromatic molecules produced in the combustion of goat derived lipids? If that were His preference in the matter, okay then, so what does it matter? I think steak smells good when its cooking, whether it turns out a burnt sacrifice or edible, and Jesus probably would have too.

I kind of doubt that a timeless being actually CAN enjoy anything. After all, "enjoy" is a verb, and verbs are actions, actions take time, but timeless beings don't act in any sense.


No, nobody has the same mental handicaps as anybody else.

You are right, there are likely a plethora of camps. I used the vague terms to point out that this isn't likely crap though, as induction really does matter, and ideas that one person just makes up usually ARE crap.

In any case, I did explain part of the reasoning.

I'm not a believer so I can't answer your questions. Though I think a lot of it is just purely chance (that people believe in God). My husband is very smart and grew up an atheist. He has a little sister who's equally smart (top of the grade in every subject) who's a devout Christian and spent her whole life after school as missionary in a foreign country. (Their parents are kinda between believers and non-believers). They obviously have many similarities, they even look alike.

The difference is mostly their friends. DH's childhood friends were mostly smart geeks and non-believers. His sisters childhood friends were like children of ministers. They all went to Christian summer camps and bible college and missionary trips together. Plus his sister is 10 years younger and as far as I know, the Evangelical christianity has been really "In" in the last decade or two. So she caught the trend when going to bible college and becoming missionary became "hot". She just married another missionary.

We adore his sister and have a very good relationship with her. It's not that difficult to get along with people with different beliefs, if you accept them for who they are.

Well if you look at it this way. If God created time and space then God exists out of time and space. So he isn't in our dimension. When the Universe was formed how did the Laws of Physics get put into place? And then look at chance? I'm not convinced that I'm here by chance.

Right, that's the teleological argument. Even if it succeeds, that does not mean that Monsieur ElNotaParakeeto is correct on the cosmological argument.

In any case though, I don't know how you could expect me to explain "how the laws of physics get put into place", or even the probability. I mean, those issues are very speculative, and you know that we don't have all of the information needed to come to a conclusion. However, coming to a conclusion based upon an inability to explain the physical constants still seems to be an appeal to ignorance. As it stands, if there are an infinite number of universes, then there is no chance, and you still exist, and there is no God. That does not mean that this is true, but.... we're not limited to only one hypothesis being the only possibility.

Edit: Even further, what is the chance that God could not exist/His interests were massively different? I mean, your argument isn't that God exists necessarily, but rather that the nature of reality includes God. But, the problem is that a universe that favors human life seems about as arbitrary as a spiritual force that exists for no reason that randomly likes human beings. In both cases, there is a logical possibility that things are other than they are, and one can still demand grounding principles to say why reality works the way it does, as one could still say that there is a question of "chance".