Why do/don't you believe in a higher power? (Any HP)

[Salandriagado]

Never attribute to intent that which can just as easily be explained by dumb luck. A bajillion monkeys typing randomly over an infinite period of time will produce the works of Shakespeare at some point, but that doesn’t make it anything particularly special.

Being lucky enough to be watching when it actually happens doesn’t inherently mean you were favored by some divine force either. Our presence here on Earth is only special because of its statistical improbability, and trying to slap intent behind it is frankly insulting.

I don't think they would do so, but moreover, there wasn't such a great chance. When the universe was created, there was a single point in which all the mass in the universe was at one point, possibly there being no time and space.

Putting aside, for a moment, the simplifications that you're using: and?

Secondly, this was not something that happened once of a few times over history, but it happened many times throughout existence, and the universe ordered itself in the same way according to the same laws which should have made the expansion of the universe impossible.

Erm, no. It is a thing that has happened precisely once, and the mechanism behind it is fairly well understood in the context of said laws.

[Salandriagado]

No, they speculated. Without evidence or basis they used word salad to try and build a picket fence around their idea of ‘god’.

No, they had plenty enough evidence, just evidence you find insufficient.

EDIT: This is actually an excellent example of the arrogance of people today to just dismiss out of hand the works of our predecessors as ‘word salad’, forgoing any honest evaluation of their claims or arguments.

Given that said works have been very thoroughly debunked literally centuries ago, there's no arrogance in continuing to point out that they're garbage.

[Salandriagado]

Yuh huh.



Given our current understanding of the universe, this portion right here is hi-fucking-lariously wrong.

Explain how the Big Bang could have happened with gravity in existence.

Gravity didn't exist yet. even if it did: cosmic inflation started out faster than gravity.

Also, many scientists think that it is correct that the universe was at a single point, with time only existing within that point, as that is one of the many theories about spacetime, gravity, and the origin of the universe.

No.

[Salandriagado]

You are aware that gravity came about after the big bang right?
Sure, but we can tell that using the scientific method is very useful since it is based in science that we have the technology we have today. No other method has been as successful in producing useful results as science. Certainly believing in a god has not.

I am aware of that, which was the point that I was making, that the laws of the universe were different at one point, or even that the universe came into existence, perhaps even outside of time's existence.

And from "physics changed" (in a totally natural way that we understand reasonably well), you then make the utterly absurd leap to bullshit.

The scientific method, however, cannot stand on its own, it needs to be coupled with a philosophical theory of existence upon which it can be proven.

No.

[The Grims]

I'd like to point out that 90% of the arguments on this thread are completely right... if for the sake of argument we presume that this one particular god is the right/wrong one.

There hundreds of thousands of Gods, Spirits, Demons, Godkings, Kim Jong Ills, and other supernatural beings being worshipped/were worshipped across the globe, but for some reason, arguments on both sides (both started and continued) argue under the presumption that this "Yahweh" or "Allah" is absolutely not real/real. I may be a bit biased considering my position on religion, but come on. Diversify your pallet for gods you're bashing Atheists, and don't be so cocky Muslims Jews and Christians.

/rant

I'll admit, arguing with a Hindu, sun-worshiper, neo-pagan, or wiccan on the nature of religion would be a nice change of pace.

We could make a "why is your religion/god(s) superior to other religions?" thread.

[Salandriagado]

Actually you cannot prove any of these assumptions period. And they are assumptions that everyone, even theists agree with. So basically you don't understand therefore god.

I acknowledge the necessity of assumptions, I think the assumption of a God is a simpler assumption than the assumption of universal laws applied to a universe which spontaneously came into existence.

Except that the universe "spontaneously coming into existence" isn't one of the assumptions.

[Salandriagado]

I did not say the Christian God I said a god. And if no god exists then that explains that things can come about without a god just fine. Basically the idea that a mind can exist without space/time that is capable of creating space time.

I don't agree with the underlined part, specifically, I think that that creates additional assumptions about what the prime mover is.

That's trivial: "nobody". Why should there be a prime mover?

I would argue, as St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas did, that there must be something outside of spacetime (or as they put it, outside of creation), or else the universe could not have begun. Their theory was that something exists eternally, outside of time (which they claimed was a product of existence).

This continues to be an utterly unjustified claim.

[Salandriagado]

What we're asked to believe is that a god set in motion a vast universe in order to house a small planet of which only a small tribe would understand that god. That god would then have to protect the tribe through history to ensure they can survive and spread the word while allowing for a wide variety of diseases, natural disasters, violence and more.. and the only apparent reason is that the tribe can spread the message and divide the world into those who worship that god and those who don't.

It's a ridiculous scenario that should be an embarrassment to any purported god as a thing to do.

Christianity would respond that God created the universe and all within it so that he could have something to love.

Boy, your god sure fucking likes vacuum, doesn't he?

[Salandriagado]

Aww diddums, and then be unknowable and demand we love him back on faith alone and punish us if we don't with floods and war and disease.

What. a. dick.

Even if a god exists, we have no means of knowing their intent other than guesswork, which religion do we follow, that of a small tribe in Israel, in Saudi Arabia, in India.. China.. where? Why go to all that effort to run everything on one small tribe to survive, what is the point?

So they're effectively irrelevant to our lives since we've know solid means of understanding how to respond.

Whether a god exists or not, they're no guide to living life so we may as well go back to science, which we can understand.

I already explained why science doesn't provide the answers of religion. Not only to problems of existence, but it can't answer problems of morality and ethics.

Most religions are infamously terrible at such things, too: they tend to rely on "this is right because I say so, end of story", rather than any actual consistent ethical framework.

[Free Arabian Nation]

Christianity would respond that God created the universe and all within it so that he could have something to love.

Boy, your god sure likes fucking vacuums, doesn't he?

ftfy

[The Grims]

Christianity would respond that God created the universe and all within it so that he could have something to love.

Boy, your god sure fucking likes vacuum, doesn't he?

Is that where he hides his dark matter collection?

[Salandriagado]

He could've created the universe without rigging it at the beginning for us to fail in the garden.

We would argue that it wasn't rigged. We were free to choose whichever we wanted.

Unfortunately, it turns out free will is an illusion. There are two types of thing in the universe: random and predetermined. Neither allows for free will.

However, interestingly, this is where Aquinas and Augustine's argument gets very confusing.

They propose the idea that, because time is a property of the universe, and God is outside the universe, that God observes the entire universe at once. That is, that, for God, time is not linear and all events happen "simultaneously." (they actually back this up pretty well with scripture).

Once again, quoting scripture as evidence of the existence of a god is circular.

[Hanafuridake]

I'll admit, arguing with a Hindu, sun-worshiper, neo-pagan, or wiccan on the nature of religion would be a nice change of pace.

We could make a "why is your religion/god(s) superior to other religions?" thread.

“Superior” is absolutely meaningless as a metric for religious discussions and would just result in petty one upmanship that would quickly result in the mods locking the thread because of the heavy flammable material present.

[Salandriagado]

I can't find page 528, but you can get the idea from 529, basically their argument is that, because all things are yet to happen, are happening, and have already happened, from the point of view of God, that God doesn't "know" what will happen, he can simply watch it all happen "before" it actually happens. It's not foreknowledge that allows God to know what we will do, but rather perfect observation.

That's equivalent, and doesn't address any of the problems.

[Hystaria]

...Cause my belief is to not belief/live around it until it is proven that it exists.

Its more likely dragons in some form existed than an all powerful space dude with a fetish of one planet and one species.

...I like to keep this civil, so please dont damn me or something. I have morals, I think the devil doesn't exist too. Im not against Christianity specifically, and no, my father did not have an influence on my ideas.

I am merely a dictionary atheist: a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods.

[Salandriagado]

It doesn't matter, it's all we have to go on to understand and observe this world. Yet still, if you're really getting down to this level you've put yourself into a tiny and ever-shrinking space to justify the idea that a god could exist, which is a long long way from providing any rationale for the idea that a god does exist.

You're a shrinking puddle of thought.

I already provided empirical reasoning for why a god must exist.

Don't lie.

[Salandriagado]

Hmm... hearing it said like that gives it a little circularity in the argument.

That's the point, I'm saying all arguments are inherently circular because they are grounded at the end in something which cannot be proven. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, because I think a circular argument, at some level, is necessary, whether that's the belief in the universe, the belief in God, or the belief in the self-evidence of the mind. Whichever it is, it validates empirical evidence, by which we can learn about the universe.

No, all arguments have axioms. This isn't a problem, so long as you pick consistent axioms. You have explicitly chosen inconsistent axioms, so all reasoning proceeding from those axioms is inherently worthless.

[Salandriagado]

Because 1) If God exists, there's no reason to doubt our observations are false. Such an existence would not be implausible, because a God could absolutely create such a thing. and 2) If reality exists, presumably our observations can be trusted.

Actually, our observations can be false.

In one biblical story, god stopped the rotation of the earth. The historians wrote down that the sun had stopped moving. This is incorrect. They wrote something down wrong despite being guided by the holy spirit to write it down. I don't think the historians were dumb by any means, it's just their god performed a miracle that he knew would be misinterpreted.

Except that, you know, it never happened.

[Salandriagado]

Basically, for the proof of reality, I believe in Descartes' formula of thought proving existence, through self-evidence. I take that further to say that it is unlikely that my observations are false, and that what I experience is most likely existence.

Agreed to here. Note, however, that the existence, or lack thereof, of the universe, is irrelevant to this: my actions would be identical, whether the universe really existed or was merely some sort of delusion.

However, I observe an elegant simplicity in the complexity of the universe, specifically, how the natural laws of the universe come together to form a functional whole.

Boy, you've really never looked into physics, have you?

Specifically, I refer to how the subatomic particles combine to form 118 different types of atoms*, which can combine to form millions of types of molecules which can continue to gain in complexity up to the point of intelligent life.

This is an obvious conclusion of elementary particle physics, no deity involved.

Moreover, the laws of the universe, such as gravity, space, and time, point to that the universe had a "beginning" at which we can no longer observe.

Yes.

I reason that there must be something which explains how the "beginning" took place,

Sure. That "something" is called "the big bang".

and that something must lie beyond space and time, a being beyond our reality, which created our universe. Such a being would reasonably, be called a god.

This is six utterly unjustified leaps of logic in a row:

1. There's no reason for this thing to be "beyond space", whatever the fuck that means.
2. There's no reason for this thing to be "beyond time", whatever the fuck that means.
3. There's no reason for this thing to be a being.
4. There's no reason for this thing to be "beyond our reality", whatever the fuck that means.
5. There's no reason for this thing to have "created our universe" in any meaningful way.
6. There's absolutely no reason to call some natural thing that happened to trigger a particular event tens of billions of years ago a "god".

On top of that, you haven't actually addressed the issue: even if we assume all of the above: where did this deity of yours come from? After that, why could the universe not have simply existed for all of eternity in a hot, dense state, then some random perturbation happened to create the universe as we know it today?

>We have to know what came before the big bang to give it serious thought
>God's just kind of always been there

If something predates the Big Bang, it predates time and space, and its existence is inconceivable to us in an ordinary sense. Such a thing would not require causation, because it could exist eternally.

So why can this thing not simply be the early universe?

[Salandriagado]

Simple building blocks and complexity

It's not to say someone had to build the universe but just the mathematical ease with which you can create huge complexity from simple blocks.

I think some people can't grasp the vastness of time over which that complexity occurs.

That's my point exactly. If you came across an entire world built with legos, you wouldn't say that it arose naturally.

Only because we have no knowledge of how such a thing could arise naturally. We do, however, have plenty of knowledge for how the universe can arise naturally.

[Salandriagado]

No, I just have to understand that great complexity can arise from simple building blocks, I don't need to assume a creator. I did hesitate on using this example because I knew the *builder* bit would be seized on rather than the principle of great complexity from simple building blocks over vast time.

Kind of like how evolution works.

I don't think that example works precisely because I don't think such a complex world or a simple building block could have occurred naturally.

Then you're simply wrong.

[Salandriagado]

That's not time, that's causality. Time is not an independent property.

Causality doesn't even make sense if time doesn't exist.

You can absolutely have causality in a time-less universe: causality is simply the statement that in the digraph of all events with causal edges, there are no directed loops.

[Salandriagado]

Concentrated Singularity (that's how it was described to be, the little ball of energy before the big bang) is also pretty inconceivable. There's no reason for preference of your god over the secular.

Because there must have been something to set off the concentrated singularity, as otherwise presumably it would have remained as it was for eternity, as it would have nothing acting on it to cause it to change.

Why? Why, for example, could such a hot singularity not just spontaneously throw out a universe? We know that things happen spontaneously for no external reason all the damned time, so why not that one?

[Hystaria]

...Cause my belief is to not belief/live around it until it is proven that it exists.

Its more likely dragons in some form existed than an all powerful space dude with a fetish of one planet and one species.

...I like to keep this civil, so please dont damn me or something. I have morals, I think the devil doesn't exist too. Im not against Christianity specifically, and no, my father did not have an influence on my ideas.

I am merely a dictionary atheist: a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods.

Oof im swamped.

Its fine AN but i would like some convo as well.

[Salandriagado]

:)

No one is supporting them for today’s landscape. Every scholarly explanation is trainwreck for you people, anyway. The 21st century and the Late Bronze Age have completely different moral landscapes, and purges like these do belong in the BCE era, and God was speaking to the Israelites in their context, not in the lens of a 21st century SJW liberal. No one ever said that there is any reason to do it now or to say that they were beautiful. In either case, the Canaanites were very much inclined to fight Israel either way. It was basically “Destroy the other before they destroy us.”

One must also note that there are those that willfully became allies to or/and became part of Israel and were treated well because of that: EX., the Gibeonites, the kinsmen of Uriah the Hittite, and the likes of Araunah the Jebusite. The bottom line is that Canaanites were ordered to be destroyed for their moral degeneracy that would make even a modern day BDSM enthusiast cringe, for their own intention to fight Israel to the last man, for their hideous idolatries, and for their refusal to repent. If you were there, maybe you’d see a broadside view of things. But no, you stick only to the morality of the modern day and refuse to understand a simple word: context. Even you’d cringe when you witness firsthand what kind of things they did.

You realise that you just admitted that there's no consistent objective morality, and hence no God, right?