Written in response to Post 63 in Atheists in the Pulpit.



Lightfoot is a Christian and seems to me to be saying that as humans we have never seen either minds without brains, life coming from non-life, or anything different from cause and effect. For me, this raises the question:

So how do you explain an eternal God who comes from nowhere, gets life from nowhere, and was caused/brought into existence by nothing?

If everything must have a cause and effect, then God must have been caused. If God was caused, then he had to have a beginning. If God had a beginning he is not eternal.

If you omit God from "everything," you get into endless infinities and absurdities. The reason: "Everything" includes all the notions human thought has ever produced; hence God's reality or nonreality is not at issue here--the "God concept" is very real indeed.

Given your view stated in the quote, how do you answer my question in this post?

How did Lightfoot reply?

I looked up the link just now and I can't find my post (above). I think maybe I did not post it on that forum because I realized I could not fully defend it in the case that Lightfoot asked me how life came from non-life. I think possibly the seeds of life came to our planet via meteor from another planet; this is known as "panspermia."

There is no consensus at all among scientists about panspermia. However, if panspermia is true, then life did not come from non-life and I could not have defended my position against Lightfoot. I think that is why I did not post it on those forums. Thus, Lightfoot did not see it or reply to it.

As someone said somewhere, panspermia only pushes the question back one step. We are still stuck with the question: How did life come from non-life? For me, where life came from is not an important issue. I am on this earth and it is my responsibility to figure out how to live productively while I am here.

Questions about the origins of the universe, whether or not God exists, and what happens after we die, are interesting intellectual hobbies with which to engage ourselves while we are here. However, they are not the most important items in life. That is my position on the matter today.