Posted By: kwarl

If there was a start to thing, fine, neither atheists/scientists nor christians can prove the other wrong. But what if there wasn't?

How could there not be a start to things?

What I believe is even more of an issue in the first place is that we really don't have much experience at all.

The way I see it, all knowledge is an act of faith. It is impossible to have enough factual evidence of anything that one can believe it beyond the shadow of a doubt. But sometimes (many times, even) people view an idea and decide that the evidence supporting it is great enough and the doubt small enough that they are going to consider it to be factual and/or truthful. When a person decides to do this, they use faith to fill the area of doubt, however small that area may be.

I believe that the education system is a good way to put this into context. Throughout the entirety of a student's education, they have to maintain an incredible level of faith. Whenever the teacher says something, in order for a student to absorb the information as fact, he must have faith that the teacher is not lying to the class, and that the teacher herself is not deceived in the first place. Similarly, when a student reads a textbook, he must have faith that the author knew what he was talking about. For even most teachers and textbook authors probably don't have much experience in the field that they are teaching and just know what has been told to them through their teachers and other textbooks. There are really only a handful of people who know these things because they have experienced it themselves, and even these people are so specialized that they only know about one or two particular areas of expertise, and probably don't have a broad enough knowledge to write the whole textbook.

The upshot of all this is that we really don't have any deep intellectual experiences at all. We just share the experiences that other people have the time and knowledge to make publicly available to us. Thus, according to our own experience (with a certain degree of variation depending on your occupation/hobbies, of course), we really don't know much more than how to eat, sleep, and excrete waste (obviously this is an exaggeration of the limited capacity of individual human experience, but the idea stands).

My point is this: Considering the enormous amount of faith that we have to use in order to even have an argument such as this one, is it really that difficult to use some more faith to believe in something with no evidence? Referring back to the previous post, how hard is it to believe that some things don't have starting points when, according to the experience of any single individual, there is really only a limited amount of evidence to support the idea that a lot of things do have starting points?

I do not disagree that the two acts of faith are widely spread on the scale, but the point is that they are on the same scale at all. If we arbitrarily assign most ideas that people commonly accept as facts, even though they have not experienced it themselves, a value of one 'faith unit' (meaning that it takes one 'unit of faith' in order to believe the idea as fact), and we arbitrarily assign big ideas with little evidence, such as the existence of God or the occurrence of a Big Bang, a value of one billion 'faith units', then theoretically if you have enough faith to believe one billion little ideas, then you should have enough faith to believe in one big idea.

To be quite honest I pulled that out of the air, so if you see a way to refute it, by all means do so.

I think that your example is missing an element. You can't just compare killing two kinds of things without referencing the reasons for doing so. Your example gives me the impression that killing either bacteria or people for any reason is equivalent. But I think for your example to be valid, you must consider killing a bacteria and a person for essentially equivalent reasons in order to compare them.
If you consider someone that kills bacteria because they are harmful to humans, that is on the same line as killing in self-defense, don't you think? Also killing bacteria for no other reason than just because somebody thinks it's fun is on the same line as killing people for the same reason. It wouldn't be considered as morally incorrect, but it's at least on the same scale, right?

The most basic proof of God’s existence is simply what He has made. “For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”