Come ye faithful and ye atheist rabble.

[Haggis_McMutton]

Can you agree that everything comes from nothing?

Maybe, it comes from nothing, maybe the universe is an infinite cycle or maybe it's some other explanation that our monkey brains can't even begin to comprehend. I don't really know.

If so, can you agree that inherent qualities in matter construct the world and we can reasonably decide that these are random or guided?

If so, what does the choice say about out interest? What does it say about our belief in a purpose?

The person who believes the universe is guided presumably believes there is some higher purpose whereas the person that believes it's random presumably believes there is no such purpose.

If you mean what's the interest in holding the belief, I don't think you can tease out a singular interest that justifies a belief from the web of culture, experience, chance, personality and so on that leads to us holding a certain belief. (i.e. even if you were to give me very strong incentive to believe in god, I could not force myself to do so, at best I could pretend to believe in god)

Reality, we can never define where we came from. If we say the big bang, it is no different from saying god, because you are saying that something was there. Where did this something come from, you are not saying. Reality is it will eventually come down to a choice, is it random, or is it guided. Do we just happen to be here because of the interrelation of matter which sprang from nothingness, or is the fact that matter has interrelation which has resulted in us some meaning. If, like me, you say it has meaning, then that meaning is god. There is no more grounding in taking one point than the other. Therefore there is no 100% that you mention, it will always be 50/50.

---

God is everything. I'm part of everything. Each one of us is part of everything. Combined we all make up god.

Are you a physicalist?
If not what else is encompassed in "everything" other than the physical universe?
If yes where does the soul and afterlife talk come from?

All your post is just a story. You are telling a story about how belief in god is good for society, but you're not basing this on any facts or reasoned arguments, it's just a story. I can tell the exact opposite story from yours if you want, but it still won't be worth anything.

Shakespeare just wrote stories. He is quite well known, his critics aren't. Science is just a story. I have tried to post both sides of the story. I have tried to define my position through the sides and show where my conclusion comes from.

Shakespeare wasn't claiming to tell us how the universe works.
Science isn't a story, science relies on empiricism, replicable facts and logical deduction and induction.

If your whole story is that you wish to call the physical universe god and you wish to call molecular interactions "guided" in a way that is undetectable to us, then fine, I have nothing to argue.
You haven't explained where the soul and the afterlife come into the story though.

[Haggis_McMutton]

I respect that you have an opinion.

Hahaha, I just realized who sabotage reminds me of.


He's KLOBBER's long lost cousin !

[_sabotage_]

Our eternity's can only be judged through the individual lengths of our consciousness. We each have our own eternity's. We came from nothing and will return to nothing. At the moment we are part of everything. Everything is god. Each of us are god. And we should treat each other accordingly. If we turned our effort towards the common good, to tooling each other up for this life, so that we can not only live but act like gods and treat each other as such, then that's who we'd be. But we have kept each other as slaves for thousands of years, not because of god, but because of power and money.

We teach our children how to join this cold ass society, how to work for someone you hate not because perhaps you'd hate them if you met them on holiday at any given age, but because they are strapped in next to you for the crappy parts of the ride for so many years and then find out your last few years of life suck. That is the heaven we have made out of earth. Great, cool, it has taught us many things. But mainly it should be teaching us how to make it a better heaven. Bc when the big bang sucks itself back to nothingness that will be the end of consciousness, our universe and our god and we only have a an eternity to get it right. Will you make this your eternity or are you going to chase the coin? We have all these destructive threads, where we showcase and knock down all ideas, but we are all in the same boat. Can we not have threads that construct ideas?

[crispybits]

How do you propose we do that when large sections of the posters (and people in general) do not believe that there is anything to get "right", or that any of these ideas are any more than comfortable self-delusion? I'm broadly pantheist rather than atheist, but not in the way that you are, and I too deny that trying to create a purpose and impose it on reality serves any use at all. Reality just is, it doesn't need to justify itself by having any meaning. Why is the rain falling on my house right now? And I mean that not in the way of "water droplets are condensing high in the atmosphere and falling down and hitting your roof" kind of explanation, but "because God is watering the grass" or whatever you would give it as a purpose or direction. The question doesn't make sense. It's like asking "what colour is music?" or "what does beauty smell like?"

[nietzsche]

Is it because we are cynics?

Are we cynics because we are afraid of trying?

Why are we afraid? Because we will die. Because we are not in touch with ourselves.

Will we cease to exist? How can we conceive not existence from our existing standpoint?

Is spirituality they key back to caring?

*by spirituality I don't mean any religion, I mean getting in touch with ourselves. Religious people can be spiritual, but religion seems to carry with it all the costumes and none of the real contact.

[crispybits]

I wouldn't say we're cynics, because I don't think we can choose what we believe. So we're (and I'm speaking as if for all non-believers in a traditional desitic or theistic model here - in reality this is just my view back up by philosophy, scientific and religious exposure to form my own opinion) not seeing a proposition and choosing to disregard it as false because we don't like it, we're seeing a proposition and finding that it doesn't fit with our experiences or templates of reality, and what most of us do isn't to internally label it as false, but to file it away somewhere as something that's very unlikely, in our opinion, to be true. That's closer to realism than cynicism.

I also wouldn't say we're afraid. I would ask why it is assumed that because someone rejects something, it's because they're scared to try it? Many atheists have tried to have faith and failed. like I said belief isn't something we choose, it's something we are. If your favourite ice cream flavour was chocolate, and I convinced you somehow that your favourite should be pistachio, could you choose to start enjoying the taste of pistachio ice cream more than you enjoy chocolate? It's the same with this metaphysical stuff, and it's why Pascal's wager fails (but that's a whole separate thread on it's own right there)

As for the spirituality angle, I have no argument with it as such, because spiritualists generally don't try to force their "divine rules for life" onto me, and they don't generally try to brainwash children with unprovable mumbo jumbo about being unworthy unless you become a slave to an abusive, jealous, bigoted God-concept. But I don't necessarily believe it's any more correct than aspirituality (or naturalism). Again it's putting an anthropomorphic framework onto something that is so vastly bigger and different and more complicated and weird than we can ever conceive, and that strikes me as both arrogant in the extreme (making everything human-like as if we're the template for all of reality instead of just one tiny part of it) and also somewhat deluded.

I'll quote myself here from the Anselm's Proof thread:

For example, there's very little difference, biologically, between us and chimps. We share 99% or so of our DNA, we are structured the same way with skeltons and internal organs which by and large do all the same things, and brains which chemically work pretty much the same ways. Yet some people will train chimps up to ride a bicycle or do very basic maths or whatever, and we all marvel at how this animal can do things that we expect from a toddler. Now imagine that there's a creature that is to us what we are to chimps. That some of them could wheel out Stephen Hawking and say "look, he can do astronomical mathematics in his head" and that would be for them the equivalent of a toddler. We could have no more comprehension of their level of thinking or philosophy or intellect as could a chimp understand chaos theory or quantum physics or any of the ideas at the forefront of our understanding.

Now, instead of just making the 1% tiny difference, we are being asked to conceive of something so far beyond our limits of understanding that it would be less likely for us to do that than for an e-coli bacteria to have total understanding of the physics of the most advanced scientists to ever exist in any universe ever.

This is why God-myths are always populated with small Gods. These small Gods are completely unimaginably powerful to us, but in the grand context, look at Yahweh or Allah or Zeus or Athena or Ra or Osiris or any God throughout human history, and you will generally find something that, if you accept the above analogy about the limits to our comprehension, is so tiny that it gets dwarfed by the potential expanse of actual possibility and reality.

Add to that list of small Gods "the universe as we understand it", because you can bet your life that we're barely scratching the surface of what's actually out there in totality. Anyone that claims to have significant knowledge of that inconceivably massive and complicated and sometimes downright weird sum total of reality is doing the equivalent of standing for 30 seconds up to their ankles in the surf on a beach in north eastern Australia and proclaiming they are the world's all time, past and future, leading expert on Pacific marine biology, hydrodynamics and ocean floor topography.

[Haggis_McMutton]

Well, there's not much left for me to say after that post of cispy's.

I'd just like to make 2 short points.

1. Finding and declaiming the faults of modern society is healthy and should definitely be done. However, before suggesting utopian solutions one would do good to take a look at history and consider the fact that in virtually all past societies we would not have the capability to discuss metaphysics with strangers all over the globe.

2. Questioning everything, including the scientific method, is also healthy. However one must be careful, the line between being open minded and being Storm can be thin.
Don't be Storm.

[Maugena]

Well, there's not much left for me to say after that post of cispy's.

I'd just like to make 2 short points.

1. Finding and declaiming the faults of modern society is healthy and should definitely be done. However, before suggesting utopian solutions one would do good to take a look at history and consider the fact that in virtually all past societies we would not have the capability to discuss metaphysics with strangers all over the globe.

2. Questioning everything, including the scientific method, is also healthy. However one must be careful, the line between being open minded and being Storm can be thin.
Don't be Storm.

That was amazing.
Thanks for linking that, Haggis. :3

[Haggis_McMutton]

That was amazing.
Thanks for linking that, Haggis. :3

Check out Tim Minchin on youtube. He has many funny/interesting songs.
Here's another of my favourites. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr1I3mBojc0

[Lootifer]

I concur with my crispy friend.

[TA1LGUNN3R]

I wouldn't say we're cynics, because I don't think we can choose what we believe.

Not too sure about this point. My beliefs now (not necessarily god/universe/reality type stuff but daily outlooks) have changed drastically since I was, say, a teenager, as I've been confronted with experiences outside of my own coming up and me adjusting in accordance. Sure, my personality and general outlook remain similar (probably why I always struggled with the idea of god as a child despite years of religious influence), but the little things have changed. Some people probably never move on from past beliefs but others do.

-TG

[_sabotage_]

Well, there's not much left for me to say after that post of cispy's.

I'd just like to make 2 short points.

1. Finding and declaiming the faults of modern society is healthy and should definitely be done. However, before suggesting utopian solutions one would do good to take a look at history and consider the fact that in virtually all past societies we would not have the capability to discuss metaphysics with strangers all over the globe.

2. Questioning everything, including the scientific method, is also healthy. However one must be careful, the line between being open minded and being Storm can be thin.
Don't be Storm.

Please use the scientific method by all means. As long as we continue to learn more about the world, we are learning more about god.

As for death, we have no first-hand observations to go on, and the scientific method does not apply.

[Army of GOD]

if god is ill-defined, god can be anything

[TA1LGUNN3R]

As for death, we have no first-hand observations to go on, and the scientific method does not apply.

We have plenty. It's called medical history and it spans history.

It's easy-- brain is generator for all consciousness. Brain ceases to function, ergo consciousness ceases to function.

-TG

[Army of GOD]

while(brain == true){
body.consciousness();
}else{
cout >> "WOOOODRUFFFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!";
}

[JJM]

Really, we have so many topics like this. Its different when someone has a new idea, or a new side to the debate, but literally someone says hey lets start a new thread to debate Religion versus Science, and what do you know, 5 pages in a little over 24 hours.

[chang50]

I wouldn't say we're cynics, because I don't think we can choose what we believe.

Not too sure about this point. My beliefs now (not necessarily god/universe/reality type stuff but daily outlooks) have changed drastically since I was, say, a teenager, as I've been confronted with experiences outside of my own coming up and me adjusting in accordance. Sure, my personality and general outlook remain similar (probably why I always struggled with the idea of god as a child despite years of religious influence), but the little things have changed. Some people probably never move on from past beliefs but others do.

-TG

Just 'cos your beliefs have changed over time,as most everyone's have,does not mean we are able to choose what we believe.For a belief to be sincere you neccessarily have no choice but to believe it.

[chang50]

Really, we have so many topics like this. Its different when someone has a new idea, or a new side to the debate, but literally someone says hey lets start a new thread to debate Religion versus Science, and what do you know, 5 pages in a little over 24 hours.

I learn something new from nearly all these debates,but then I am prepared to learn,nothing I currently believe is unchallengeable.

[JJM]

Really, we have so many topics like this. Its different when someone has a new idea, or a new side to the debate, but literally someone says hey lets start a new thread to debate Religion versus Science, and what do you know, 5 pages in a little over 24 hours.

I learn something new from nearly all these debates,but then I am prepared to learn,nothing I currently believe is unchallengeable.

I don't mind it except, we have several threads for the same topic.

[BigBallinStalin]

(or am I asking for too much from a faith-based system which insists that true knowledge can only be revealed, and that knowledge gained through reason--if contradictory--must be discarded cuz religion-God-Bible-and-stuff?)

Never heard that before...what church did you go to?

Just giving a shout out to the scholasticists.

[BigBallinStalin]

Why we (those who do not believe in a creator) take the time to refute the words typed by those defending god? Why are we bothered so much to do it? Why those who believe in him need so much to prove it to us? Are we (atheists) as wrong as them (believers) in getting in these discussions?

Well, Ray answered half of this pretty well, here's Hitchens' answer to the other half:


Anyway, @ the OP.

Here's the best argument I can conjure up for a deistic god. It's gonna be a creative/fun one.

1. We have seen that very simple rules can give rise to incredible complexity. The classic example of this is the game of life
If you've never heard of it check out the following video. It explains the 4 simple rules that govern this universe and shows what complexity can arise from them.


2. Thanks to the exponential growth in computing power we've been able to run ever more complex and realistic simulations of various things, including the evolution of the early universe.
Here's what one of the most recent ones, the MilleniumXXL did:

In 2010, the 'Millennium XXL' simulation (MXXL) was performed, this time using a much larger cube (over 10 billion light years on a side), and 6720^3 particles each representing 7 billion times the mass of the sun. The MXXL spans a cosmological volume 216 and 27,000 times the size of the Millennium and the MS-II simulation boxes, respectively. Cosmologists use the MXXL simulation to study the distribution of galaxies and dark matter halos on very large scales and how the rarest and most massive structures in the universe came about.

3. Now, the big assumption. Based on 1. and 2. I'm gonna say it's not completely unbelievable to me that some day we may be able to create a simulated environment of comparable complexity to our universe

4. If 3. holds then some of our simulated universes should be able of developing complex patterns on their own, including the complex pattern known as intelligent life. This of course means that some smaller subset of these simulated universes will have the capability of creating simulated universes of their own.

5. This means we are looking at a potentially very long chain of universes down, that are simulations within simulations within simulations. Each of these universes has the same vantage point as us: they see many universes down, but none up. In this scenario it is very unlikely that we are the head of the chain. We are likely stuck somewhere in the middle.

Therefore there is a deistic pantheon of gods and they're all programmers.

Further this would just prove that the old joke:

Spoiler

What's the difference between God and a programmer?

God doesn't think he is a programmer.

is wrong.

So, it's "universes all the way down"?

[BigBallinStalin]

Add to that list of small Gods "the universe as we understand it", because you can bet your life that we're barely scratching the surface of what's actually out there in totality. Anyone that claims to have significant knowledge of that inconceivably massive and complicated and sometimes downright weird sum total of reality is doing the equivalent of standing for 30 seconds up to their ankles in the surf on a beach in north eastern Australia and proclaiming they are the world's all time, past and future, leading expert on Pacific marine biology, hydrodynamics and ocean floor topography.

I've done this in several other places but not Australia. Do I qualify for Heavy Weight World Champion of Marine Biology, Hydrodynamics, and Ocean Floor Topography Champion of the World?

[BigBallinStalin]

I like this thread. The best argument for god, I think, is the one about feeling Jesus pulsing in your heart of hearts, or however that goes. I think the human experience, and a certain amount of psychology, connects well with that concept for some reason. It's effective for that reason, and what I feel a lot of theism really boils down to. And necessarily so, or what's the point of it?

So, basically "cognitive bias" + "appeal to emotion" = Best Argument for God? (or rather best explanation for the belief in God?)

[nietzsche]

BBS, if it was concluded that (after decent research) humans need some certain amount of "magical thinking" to function properly or optimally, what would be your say in surrendering to it? i.e. being spiritual, being religious?

I don't remember where it was published but a study showed that "magical thinking" provides a release of dopamine necessary for healthy living. I'm not saying being healthy means being religious, but, we are humans, rational animals after all. Takes me back to Laputa.

I would venture that EVERYONE has the anxiety of dying, being responsible for their life. Some have it very hidden, everyone deals with it in a different manner. Cynicism is a high price to pay. Stoicism is pessimism even if you want to think otherwise.

Is it the boldness of youth?

Would you sacrifice part of your life yearnings only to be faithful to reason?

[chang50]

BBS, if it was concluded that (after decent research) humans need some certain amount of "magical thinking" to function properly or optimally, what would be your say in surrendering to it? i.e. being spiritual, being religious?

I don't remember where it was published but a study showed that "magical thinking" provides a release of dopamine necessary for healthy living. I'm not saying being healthy means being religious, but, we are humans, rational animals after all. Takes me back to Laputa.

I would venture that EVERYONE has the anxiety of dying, being responsible for their life. Some have it very hidden, everyone deals with it in a different manner. Cynicism is a high price to pay. Stoicism is pessimism even if you want to think otherwise.

Is it the boldness of youth?

Would you sacrifice part of your life yearnings only to be faithful to reason?

If I may offer an answer of sorts in the form of a question,there may well be something in the research,so am I doomed to functioning sub-optimally because I simply am unable to indulge in magical thinking?It's just white noise to me it doesn't even begin to make any sense.