Just one question now (for Atheists): Why don't you believe in God. Do you have a good reason? Is it because it doesn't interest you? Is it because of a scientific theory that proved to you that God don't exist?
I was taught from a very young age certain things about God and man: that God was all-knowing and all-powerful; that God was the creator of everything; that man was irrevocably prone to sin and therefore needed a savior; that God chose certain people to save; that heaven was the ultimate destination for those who were saved; etc...
As I grew older, I began to realize that other people had substantially different beliefs from the ones with which I had been inculcated. This was a realization only because I had been intentionally isolated from people who thought differently from my parents and educators. I noticed that what these different belief systems had in common was their moral program. All Abrahamic religions, and many others, prescribe how people ought to behave. But this moral program is not much different from common sense under conditions of abundance. The ways in which they differ are more interesting and are mostly tuned to ensure their adherents perpetuate the system.
So, with this in hand, it became readily apparent that the bulk of organized religion was a historical artifact from the time when peoples of old were figuring out how to treat one another (back at the emergence of what we term "civilization"). It is possible (and in my opinion, now necessary) to separate moral education from religious indoctrination since, ironically, much of the unrest in civilization is now caused by the differences in religious prescription rather than differences in morality.
Either that, or religious thought reeks of delusion and lacks any evidence whatsoever for what it claims. Seriously, I don't know any religious person who can demonstrate any reason for their belief other than indoctrination. Prove me wrong.
To use a source I'm sure you know, in I Corinthians 13 there is an apparent contradiction: even if you act piously, you act in vain if if you don't feel love. The religious experience is emotional and visceral, not logical. It comes before codes and rules. From this perspective, Pascal's Wager is irrelevant: if you don't follow a moral code because you believe in it, then you won't fool anyone, much less an omniscient God.
Anyway, we're digressing. If you agree that it says "have love" (or charity), why in the first place would you take it as "feel"? They're two very different things.
I was using the word "prove" ironically. My actual contention was that believers lack not just proof, but also reason. They act certain, but cannot explain their certainty except with self-referential argument. It was this inability to maintain coherence that finally undid my faith.
EDIT: What I'm trying to say is that Christianity isn't meant to be intellectually satisfying. It's about flesh and blood, as you can see from the Holy Supper. Christians ritually eat the Messiah to be united with Him.
[citation needed]
Most of the unrest in civilization has the same source it's always had: fighting over wealth and/or power. Often leaders of these fights will claim some religious reason but what you have to ask yourself is; if you took religion out of the equation would they stop fighting or would they come up with some other reason.
I presume what you had in mind was the US vs. Iraq/Afghanistan but given that we know there were no terrorists (nor WMDs) in Iraq what "religious" component was there exactly? There are some pretty obvious "power" components though.
But my question was mainly to check if you are not believing for a specific reason. A simple reason is "If God exist, why doesn't him make his existence CLEAR, without ambiguity by some kind of magical power or miracle."
I don't think non-believers "not-believe" for a specific reason, just as believers don't believe for a specific reason.
It just seems highly unlikely that there's a "god". Just as it seems highly unlikely that there are aliens from another planet living among us, or that I can levitate by merely willing it to happen. Quite unlikely, but happy to be shown/proven wrong :)
What will it cost you to believe in God while you are alive? Nothing.
What will it cost you if there really is a god and you chose not to believe? Could cost you eternity. So why not believe? The upside is (in the worst case) the same as not believing, but the downside (in the worst case) could be eternal damnation.
This is ofcourse assuming that the person that does exist, believes in the right god.
How is it that easy? We're not picking a team to support in the Finals series. The idea of believing in a "god" to me is as foreign as believing in a tooth fairy. When an employee of mine is openly religious, it is to me akin to him espousing a belief in something purely fantastical - tooth fairy, Santa Claus, etc. His choice and I don't deride it, but to me it is all entirely bizarre.
When I look at mysteries of our existence, of the creation of our universe, at no point does any fibre of my being whatsoever think to consider that a god-like higher power might be behind it all.
And even if you could force yourself to believe, without doubt, which god are you going to believe in to guarantee yourself some sort of 'eternity'?
Edit: Why the down-vote? The parent has his company and website in his info. No idea what it's like in AUS, but in the states, if someone was fired and there was any ambiguity regarding the reason, this comment could be be admissible in court to demonstrate a prior discriminatory attitude toward people based on their religion.
I don't discriminate against the guy. We are open about our positions and can discuss it at the right times, but all it is, is a difference in belief in one aspect of life (admittedly, a big aspect of his life). I pay him more than I pay myself and he is an invaluable employee who does great work for me. I think the only way he'd lose his job here is if I ran out of work for him to do!
I am just framing my perspective so that a religious person might comprehend it. e.g., Santa Claus is an identity that some people believe in at some point but not at another, and at that later point they (hopefully) have zero doubt about their belief.
To get it further back on track: If I suggested that you (marcamillion, not frederick) believed in Santa Claus to get better presents, how would you even do it? You know Santa doesn't actually deliver presents with his reindeer, right? You'd stake your house and life on it, surely?
Given that I don't know how to believe in Santa, I can't say I would stake my house and life on it.
That's how many atheists feel about the god considered by most Christians. Short of some insane brainwashing, it's just not possible to force yourself to "believe" just in case it proves useful later.
That aside, how can you say it'd "cost nothing"? It would cost me my integrity.
Another debunking of this argument: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZpJ7yUPwdU
Time. Money. Freedoms.
And there is the problem of 'multitude of religions' which other people (and you) have mentioned.
I find it quite baffling that anyone can believe in a god, actually. I mean, surely the logical inconsistencies in pretty much all religions must bother you? And moving away from organized religion, why would you believe in a "god"?
Quite good. We have a brain, we should analyze things and not only accept them as they are.
I find it quite baffling that anyone can believe in a god, actually. I mean, surely the logical inconsistencies in pretty much all religions must bother you?
A very good reason. The inconsistencies in religions are huge and spawn lot of doubts.
Just so you know, it wasn't always this way. I used to believe in Allah (as a Muslim).
However, more recently I have recognised that underneath that, deep down I just don't believe that there is a God - while simultaneously acknowledging the unprovability of this belief. So I now self-describe as atheist, and the reason why seems to be a deep-seated feeling that the theory of the existence of God just doesn't sit right. A non-God Universe is just somehow more... elegant.
It's also worth pointing out that I don't see a good practical reason to believe in a God, either. Since the God-theory makes no testable predictions, it is of little value in explaining the world around us. Explaining the past in terms of miracles perpetrated by an ineffable being gives us no guide for what to expect in the future, and is thus not worthwhile, even if it is correct.
I also happen to think that these religions' interpretations of the world are wrong.
I personally though don't take more than that from religion and think that it promotes being content with knowing less about our world and universe in order to make it's stories and non moral teachings more relevant.
Most people value religion because of its moral lessons (see PG's essay on relgious 'package deals' - I think it was in Why Nerds Are Unpopular), and perhaps fear the 'moral vacuum' of a godless world. But personally I have no trouble deriving morality from logic/reason and empirical data, so I have no need for religion.
For the record I think most of the Ten Commandments are valuable lessons regardless of their divinity.
But I'm always amused at how religious people always drop back to arguing the existence of God. The existence of God by itself is a useless metaphysical claim. There's the physical universe. I get that. We can use science to figure out the physical universe. I get that. If you attach a caption to the universe saying "by the way, an all-powerful deity made this", how exactly does that matter?
Religion gets the real work done when it says, "the all-powerful deity doesn't want you buggering other men or eating shellfish." OK, you started with an unproven metaphysical claim, and then used it to try and convince me to change my dietary and sexual habits. You've gone from vacuous to inventing unproven reasons not to bugger other men or eat shellfish! That's the thing about religion I question the most! It doesn't matter whether God exists. Once you start making actionable claims that rest on the idea of the Almighty approving or disapproving of my behavior, that's where I actually start to disagree with you.
That said, what I'd like to know is why other people actually believe this? If you were to find your holy text in a cereal box and read it in totality now, would you truly think it a divinely inspired text? Or is it simply an ancient perspective hangover that has not diverted enough attention to it's structure to warrant a full critical analysis?
I expected even more of a skew toward atheism than I saw here, actually.
So, a question to your question, is there a good reason you believe in it (assuming you do)?
Edit: petervandijck said it better above me.
Why explain that beauty away by adding a god-figure in there? Isn't the universe even more beautiful and majestic without a (fairly silly) "outside creator" explanation?
Your explanation also logically doesn't make sense. You say: I can't believe there is nothing behind it. But then what is behind God? Who created him? You can believe that? It's logically inconsistent, and makes me think that perhaps you haven't thought this through very well.
There's a similar argument around consciousness. The naive interpretation of consciousness is always: "there's a little man inside my head doing the thinking", a little "me", something that represents the self. But then, who is the little man inside the head of the little man? Same flawed logic. The latest thinking/science now says that consciousness just "arises" from processes in our brain. And the "me" is mostly an illusion. Which is, funnily, quite close to the Buddhist interpretation of the self.
I just believe he's eternal.
A quick note, you find it easy to believe that the universe can just "be" when everything you have ever seen has had a creator. (Whether you believe in science or God, it does, the creator just differs.)
Both have an equally frustrating leap of faith, you either have to believe in God, or that something can come out of nothing.
Where we differ is that I accept that I don't know where we come from, you think you do (ie. from God). One doesn't require a leap of faith, the other does.
Everybody has to have a starting point from which they have no clue how it got there.
One side has decided that it had to be God. The other? The Big Bang? (Where'd it come from?)
"Big guy in the sky was hanging around in void and created it all" posits nothing about the nature of time, and in fact infers that time is eternal and has always been, as big guy in the sky is eternal and has always been, that's why it's not logically inconsistent to point out that the god hypothesis simply raises more questions whilst taking a competing theory to the genesis of time proper does not fail in the same way.
Where'd time come from?
By what method did the color blue arrive at it's current physical location in space, also, what does it taste like?
I realise the above sounds cryptic but I'm just trying to give examples of how concepts are intrinsic to their own space to a certain degree, time as a spatial dimension of the universe terminates by definition at the genesis of the universe, so what came "before" has no more meaning than the taste of the color blue.
What is a nature of spacetime? We have a model to work with it, we have a model to measure it, but what is it and why is it?
We have a model that explains how space could come out of "nothing", but that nothing is still a quark field (if I remember correctly from watching a video from some astronomer). So what is the nature of that quark field, where did that come from?
There is always that first cause / prime mover at the end of every question, not to mention again that we know nothing on topics of great importance without even coming to a roadblock of first cause/prime mover.
Religion puts first cause/prime mover as a recursive feedback where it is the source and the end aka God. Which, ah well I don't know... takes faith :D There is also vast amount of religious writings throughout history amongst various religions that overlaps in content.
I'm not on either side basically. I accept I can't know for sure first cause/prime mover, I know I can't be cock sure in anything of it. Hence, I think it's best to have a romanticized view of things in general to keep my own spirit up and creative. If that particular view to someone is abrahamic god, allah, brahma, forgotten realsm or whatever - so be it. I suspect that the ultimate 'truth' is whatever you make of it, because in the end that is only thing that matters to you/your mind, what you make of it.
As for "The latest thinking/science now says that consciousness just "arises" from processes in our brain.". That's just one view which is not prevalent in science of mind yet, because our understanding of consciousness has not moved anywhere beyond philosophy yet. Consciousness is a weird thing, core consciousness that is (self-awareness, 'self') - not intellect around it, which we can view via fMRI. Consciousness is known that it can have only two states, conscious and unconscious. That's it. It can't be altered via medicines/drugs, it can't be divided, brain traumas/operations can't alter it (various injuries, removals, even hemispherectomy). Nothing can alter it. It can be only turned on or off. Weird thing, huh?
Recently there has been some breakthroughs in quantum biology (look it up, interesting stuff). But as I've said, our understanding of our consciousness hasn't moved from philosophy to hard science yet (I have a hunch it never will, but we'll see). I also came across nice site where various themes like this are covered with numerous talkers from both sides of a fence (hell they even have Minsky :) ), look here: http://closertotruth.com (warning though since it can dive into heavy philosophy+logic).
edit:
here look at this what Geroge Lakoff has to say about it http://closertotruth.com/video-profile/Why-is-Consciousness-... (watch it 'till the end!) and what others have to say about same question: http://closertotruth.com/topic/Why-is-Consciousness-Baffling...
For my part I believe in God because he speaks to me regularly and I'm the last person you'd expect that to happen to. I was minding my own business when I started hearing from God. Everyone I knew at the time was totally shocked and it took me over two years to accept what God was telling me (i.e. that the Bible is for real and I would do well to listen to what he's saying through it to me). I read Nietzsche and Russell in college and enjoyed them. I didn't really like Christianity as a religion much but I was nice to Christians I met and didn't really argue with them much. I didn't believe in anything but was respectful to everyone in other words.
My life now is defined by me trying to connect with God and make the most of my time here. I'm not trying to earn anything but I'm working because my God works all the time on my behalf. If God is my father then doing what he does is only the right thing to do if I'm actually his son. I split my time between serving adults (pastoring type stuff), children (Sunday school stuff), and the poor (I run a temporary food pantry). I also run a business to support my family, help my community, and build wealth. I keep busy and wouldn't change anything.
For me not believing in God is pretty hard even though I've seen some pretty bad things happen to people in my community that we prayed to turn around for over two years in one case. The only thing to do in the face of massive disappointment is to continue on. I've seen amazing responses to prayer and some big unanswered prayers too. Jesus prayer before he was arrested was unanswered as well. I take some comfort in that.
Life is pretty complicated and there are no easy answers especially when it comes to God and a life of faith. For me the stakes of life were raised considerably when I started following Jesus. It's not easy but it's not me to figure it all out either. The only faith I argue for is a living faith with a deep connection to a living God. I'd encourage to learn about that faith--not the faith that people say is found in books. No one in the Bible lived that way why should you or anyone else?
What is that like?
If you ask him how he's doing he's always doing great. If you ask him how you're doing he always say you're doing great. I've asked him this immediately after doing something I knew was pretty stupid and God seemed unconcerned even though I asking him hoping to get corrected and some guidance on the issue. He told me that he wasn't too worried about it.
The actual sensation is pretty weird. I'm not the most gifted person at hearing from God but if you ask him to he'll talk to you and say some pretty cool things. I freely admit that I could be a crazy person talking to myself of course. The reason I believe otherwise is that I'm not the crazy person type and I hear weird things from God. I'm always expecting him to be mad at me or disappointed but he never is. The story of God's people is that they always expect one thing and he's working another way. It's the Wire when Marlo says "You want it to be one way-but it's the other way."
I want it to be religious way (i.e. doing things to make God happy or at least less angry) but God has things setup another way. If you have a kid you can sort of understand but it seems like God sees us like we see our own children. I'm happy watching my daughter do just about anything and I think God is happy seeing me do just about anything too. Yesterday my two year old daughter comforted two crying boys and cheered one of them up pretty well. She really cares how people are doing and wants to make them feel better. I think God reacts the same way I did when I saw her do something good-he couldn't be happier just like I couldn't have been happier. She didn't earn my love there but she made me very proud of her.
Hope that helps a little :)
You know what freaks me out? The idea of seeing an angel. No idea why but it freaks me out good. I hear kids often say they see them and it freaks me out whenever they tell me that. I am no one a kid would ever try to impress mind you. I just hear these things because kids are so free to share with you. Weird I know but I don't want to see one till I am dead.
This whole crazy stuff started while reading GEB if you are familiar with that book. I really was minding my own business.
I'm not sure a 22 year old programmer goes from reading Russell and Nietzsche one day to following Jesus the next day without something having happened. Whether that's psychological or spiritual something happened to me.
Not trying to offend you, in your shoes, I'd like to think I'd pick door number two.
These experiences didn't let up for two years and I found myself feeling strongly pulled to do things like buy Bibles and attend church. Eventually I did both of those things and my life only improved from there.
I'm not so sure that anything I believe is logically inconsistent. I believe that God intervened in human history in a big way and in such a way that makes it possible for me to approach him with confidence.
One way of proceeding to argue with it, for example, would be to say, "how do you know you're not mad?".
[Amusingly half way through writing this comment, this radio programme started: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/pZ-Jq-iaTOia... It's about an object that apparently people used to use to talk to god!]
The other side of that sword is that the personal religious experience argument isn't especially convincing to others, either.
Lets say, for the sake of argument. You don't believe in god. What would stop you from doing the above things you mentioned? Would it be fair for me to make an assumption (and I apologize if I am wrong), that you are not necessarily doing those noble things because you think those things will help people, but possibly you are doing those things to appease your god so that you get a better after life.
Assuming my above assumption is right (again I apologize if its not), do you see the inconsistency in your morality?
Faith without works is dead. Works without faith is just work. Faith and works is a living faith supported by a living God. If you have faith but do nothing in response then you should work that out. If you have no faith and works Jesus says that you already got your reward and you're all set. He has nothing to give you. I pretty much summed up the book of James in the Bible.
As for the afterlife everyone who follows Jesus gets a pretty awesome deal and while there is some hinting at a bonus for doing well it's not really that interesting because level 1 heaven is pretty awesome. There is a law of diminishing marginal utility after all.
So to be clear works get you little and faith is the source of everything.
I was told to read the Bible and after reading the gospel of Matthew I was told that what I was reading was reliable and to be trusted entirely.
Of course, there are plenty of reasonable people who don't find them compelling. There's a lot of room for individual judgment in this area, and the subject is so incredibly complex that I don't find it surprising that thoughtful people come to completely different conclusions.
I think the best counterargument is the multiverse. In fact Rees argues for this explanation in the final chapter of his book. It's important to differentiate here between the multiverse as a scientific and philosophical concept. My problem with the multiverse as a scientific concept is that it's not currently testable, which I think excludes it from the realm of science. That said, just because something isn't testable doesn't mean it is wrong, and God certainly isn't in the realm of science either. So I think both God and the multiverse have to both be approached from a philosophical standpoint. My problem with the multiverse as a philosophical explanation is that we then have to explain where the multiverse came from. This is moving somewhat into the Leibnizian cosmological argument, but God is understood by the monotheistic and some philosophical traditions as a necessary being, which is something that exists eternally and is effectively its own reason for its existence. I have yet to see an author make the case that the multiverse is philosophically necessary. Or to put it differently, the multiverse as a proposed explanation isn't foundational for existence in the way that God is generally conceived to be, and has less explanatory power (in a metaphysical sense).
There are a number of other counterarguments, which I think range from bad to not quite as good as the multiverse. I'd be inclined to address them, if not for the fact that I don't think anyone's reading this thread anymore, and even if they were I'm approaching the TL;DR point.
Keep in mind that when I said I thought this was a strong argument for the existence of God I didn't mean I find it one-hundred percent convincing, but that it is strong relative to the other arguments I've encountered. I think it is at least possible that a multiverse exists and is necessary for reasons we can't comprehend. To clarify, I find the combination of the seven arguments I mentioned above gets me to about a 2.3 on the Dawkin's Scale, but if I only had fine-tuning I think I'd be somewhere around a 4 or 5.
Does it mean considering that an idea you hold in your mind is a valid conceptual representation of some aspect of external reality?
Or does it mean to value an idea in itself, irrespective of its relationship with any autonomous external reality?
As I find with many atheists, I believe there may be some higher power, but it does not affect my daily life (outside of the way in which religious beliefs have become societal norms or vice versa).
You should take into account that those religions appeared hundred, yet thousands of year before you. They are custom made for the population of that time and they should have basic ideas that their brains can understand. So those religions may not meet your expectation. But, this in itself, is not a reason to say "God doesn't exist". You should dig somewhere else.
As I find with many atheists, I believe there may be some higher power
Scientifically speaking, there are not sort of "higher power".
I am not looking to criticize Americans here, but I think in everyday life, there isn't all that much of a difference with less religious European countries, in spite of the apparent emphasis on religion here in the US.
You cannot tell religion till it is unpopular, and oftentimes till it is persecuted.
Ah, yes. In some European countries, this is much less the case. I noticed that in the US it's perfectly normal for the president (or other public figures) to say that they have been praying, for example. In the Netherlands, if the prime minister said that nowadays, people would look at him like he's pretty weird, or at least old-fashioned. =) (Even if that prime minister belongs to the "christian democrat" party.)
(It wasn't always like that, by the way; only a few decades ago religion played a much more important role in politics, with separate political parties for every major christian denomination.)
Great point. It's hard to tell if someone really believes in something when professing belief in that thing is universally expected in society.
When the concept of God is invoked, it is usually not precisely defined. In various interpretations, it is a life force permeating the universe itself, or a being that is benevolent, omnipotent and omniscient, or a being that has a "personal guiding light" relationship to every individual human, or a force that was "the prime mover" that setup the conditions of the universe just right, wound up the spring and then let it go, and has never interfered since, or rarely.
So, we postulate the existence of an ill-defined 'thing' or 'being' that has multiple unrelated purposes: to establish an explanation to questions about physical reality which are unexplained by current scientific knowledge; to establish a moral society; to establish a system of personal ethics for an individual human; to establish a sense of security and purpose in an evil and impersonal universe. Mind you, in the most common statement, all of these postulates are untestable in principle, under the guise of "well, if it was testable, it wouldn't be faith, would it?"
So, Occam's razor, in its Wikipedia form, is that an explanation with the fewest new assumptions is usually the correct one. An explanation that requires assuming an entity with multiple qualities, where each one of those qualities is untestable in principle, fails with aplomb.
If one obtains answers to a number of questions (meaning, morality, afterlife, etc) by postulating the existence of God, is the nonbeliever exempt from having to answer those questions?
In pursuit of the answers, the nonbeliever must make new assumptions outside of simple nonbelief because simple nonbelief doesn't provide answers. Doesn't Occam's Razor then side with belief in God? I am not referring to simple belief in some higher power, but Biblical Christianity.
I believe that those questions (meaning, morality, afterlife, etc) are essential to a coherent worldview and are human questions rather than religious questions.
But even if I did believe that there would be something up there, I don't believe in a Christian God - in fact I know such a person couldn't exist - because the bible has so many contradictions in it.
Otherwise, it's just a personal feeling about an English word. Which doesn't have much meaning to me. I have some workable idea about what God should be for me, I can even believe in it, but I guess it wouldn't make any sense to you or anybody else -- and I still remain an atheist :-)
In the specific case of the roman catholic church I believe the pope should be arrested & trialed for crimes against humanity, stripped of his powers; vatican city should be dissolved & any claims of diplomatic immunity should be rejected. Never gonna happen though.
People are afraid that they might have it wrong, so they allow themselves to assert that since they cannot disprove the existence of "God" or some other inexplicable thing, then it could exist (or as some will further conclude, does exist). This little bit of fallacious logic can allow one to conclude that anything could be possible. It's rooted in the fear of uncertainty.
Still others will believe in an ephemeral "God" which they attribute to the unquanitifiable or undetermined aspects of the universe. Many scientists who also claim to be religious hold this view of the unverse (as far as I know). They will find "God" in their pursuit of the prime numbers, unexplained quantum phenomena, or some other mysterious corner of existence. However, I also find this view fallacious as the relational model of the universe will keep these "believers" continously finding new "Gods" all the time. We will figure out the prime numbers eventually, and there are more and more quantum phenomena explained by very solid theories.
It's like people with ghost stories. I know lots of people with stories about their encounters with ghosts. I've never seen one. I've looked and never seen one. Every story about ghosts usually involve a single person and rarely have witnesses. Why is that? If ghosts exist and are part of the natural order of the universe, why haven't I seen one? Why aren't they as normal as birds, trees, and air?
Any charlatan will generally be able to fill in the blanks here. Ghosts only make themselves known. I can't see them because I don't believe. Without any evidence for the existence their nature cannot be known so a person could attribute any sort of story about the nature of ghosts. So really the only real attribute about ghosts is that they make for useful literary devices.
Similarily, if "God" is a natural part of the universe (and indeed created the whole thing) why are any of us debating whether "God" exists at all? It's precisely because "God" doesn't exist that we can debate endlessly about the nature of "God" and it's existence. Our fear and uncertainty will permit us to assert the possiblity of "God"'s existence.
I have no such fear.
What I do fear is the culmination of such uncertainty and fear organizing into legally-recognized institutions that brow-beat the public into tolerating their beliefs.