Does God Exist? (2 Viewers)

[lengstar]

you know the idea of wishing for something realistic only shows that your hoping for something with which you wish for is more likely to come true then some unrealistic desire.

say if you wish to see this person again because they are leaving to another country. why do you wish? because you desire to see that person again and hope to see them again. if they said they are leaving and say they don't know if they are coming back and you pray for them to return, its not up to you if they choose to return or not, its up to them. and if they should return is not some devine intervention. it is the individual. even if you don't believe in god, if you have a close relationship with another person would you not wish for their return? what i'm saying is that god doesn't come into this.

 

[ahmad]

oh yes there is a thing such as god.............

otherwise i don't believe the big bang could occur on its own...........

remember people dont believe in god with a concept of "there is a reason behind everything" that why they dont accept faith

 

[Not-That-Bright]

ok, u guys i don't necessarily believe in the big bang theory! it is ONE possible explanation for life.

We've had these arguments come up before, we dismiss them then people go back to i belive in god because i have 'faith', and that god exists beyond human logic.

That is what the whole religious argument comes down to.

If you want to believe in god.... for the reasons i layed out earlier... comfort, etc, then it's fine.. But realise that this is why you WANT to believe in god... and that is the reason for your FAITH, if there is a WANT you will make up all sorts of things... I'm sure that many people wanna go out with 'X' girl and probably make up in their head that she secretly might like them or whatever...

 

[owoodley]

why is it that you guys choose not to face my questions when i ask them, give me your reasons for believing in god and i'll give you my answer... don't just walk away from that and start on some other reason...
QUOTE]


Religion is older than science.... and does god exist? Yes.... after all it would be pretty stupid to have such a debate on something that wasn't/isn't there....

god is everywhere.... Look out! He's behind you!

 

[Dougie]

summary of past pgs!

i just thought it'd save some reading, so...
the only way to end a discussion like this is for everyone to realise that there is no right and wrong. some ppl think there is a god, some ppl think there's something else, some ppl believe in science, someppl believe in nothing, etc. nothing can really be proved, and so the stalemate we've been reaching for the last 8 pgs is that everything is BELIEF dependant. once u believe in something, it is then easier to start proving it. So if that is the case, then the most important thing is the INDIVIDUAL. ppl should not have to prove their belief, because beliefs of this nature cannot be proved, and because a person's belief is prob. the single most important thing to someone... it's who they are. If the individual is happy in their belief, then in the end, that is where the conversation ends. the individual should not have to prove their belief (they can't anyway) to all others. so if the individual is happy with their views, and they BELIEVE their belief, they're happy, and really don't need to worry about what everyone else thinks. there belief won't be changed unless they want it to be changed, so they're still happy.
individual happiness is the most important thing...
beliefs of this nature can't be prooven....
and no-one has been able to argue my statement from before... "everything is somewhere"
hope that helps

 

[Not-That-Bright]

that statement is wrong, it comes back to your idea that 'nothing is impossible' there is no rock that you can lift but cannot lift somewhere'.

We accept that beliefs are important... and that each belief is an individual thing etc etc.

However all god like beliefs... once we dispell alot of the idiocies of some of the claims, come down to 'it's my belief, so i believe it', which doesn't make sense... the reason for you believing in something is not because you believe, just as the reason you like cricket is not because you like cricket.

As stated before, these people are ready to say that science is wrong when they find one problem with it, however we find faults in the other aspects of why they believe..... 'prayer, miracles, etc' and they keep comming up with something else, in the end all that is left is 'I believe because I believe',

Which is fine... but to find out why you believe i think you should do a little soul searching, it's probably for comfort... or because you like feeling that there's more out there... or for a sense of justice cuz u dun like seeing evil people win....or a combination of a bunch of things.

 

[Not-That-Bright]

Religion is older than science.... and does god exist? Yes.... after all it would be pretty stupid to have such a debate on something that wasn't/isn't there....

god is everywhere.... Look out! He's behind you!

Religion also used to convince people that the sun god comanded the sun to appear...

I am an atheist, and atheism has been around for longer than any relgion and will probably be around longer than the rest.

How long has religion been around?

Some would say since the Creation of the world - about ten thousand years ago. A more reasonable answer would be: since the beginning of human thought - hundreds of thousands of years ago. When the first humans ran in fear from a bolt of lightning; felt the horror of a mother and baby dying in childbirth; witnessed a mountain explode in a fountain of molten rock; saw a comet plough through the firmament; watched one friend survive an unlikely accident when others perished; noticed the changing of the seasons;wondered where we came from and where we are going - they asked for an explanation.

Gods, Godesses, demons, angels, spririts, ghosts and goblins have long been the standard answer. Every year, a new god is created. People find a new Holy Object to bow down to, begging for luck, healing, blessings or for a message to be passed to a dead relative. During your lifetime, how many people have claimed to be the incarnation of one god or another, and gathered a following of thousands of devout believers? How many psychics are available to communicate with the spirit world on your behalf? (And how come psychics never contact living people with messages from the dead? Has a Psychic Hotline operator ever called you to say "Sorry to trouble you, but your great-great-great-grandmother would like a quick chat"?) How many different deities have been worshipped in the last two hundred thousand years? How many have been lost, never again to hear a prayer or to receive a sacrifice of flowers or blood?

For as long as people have had questions, there have been Holy men and women ready to provide answers. Priests, priestesses, druids, shamen, witches, witch-doctors, vicars, monks, mediums, spiritualists, nuns and a thousand others - all claiming to have some mysterious link to the Unseen World, all claiming to know the Unknowable Truth.

Since the beginnings of human thought, the supernatural has been given as an explanation of the natural. Before the development of microbiology and space telescopes, all these mystical notions seemed to be perfectly reasonable. People prayed for rain, and eventually it rained. People made sacrifices, and they survived another year. Appease the Gods and the earthquakes will stop. Do as the priest says, and the Sun will appear again from behind the moon. Believe strongly enough, and the child will recover.

For hundreds of thousands of years, people have thought this way. And they still do - old habits are hard to break.

How long has atheism been around?

Atheism came into being with the first life-forms in the universe. For billions of years, creatures have had no belief in deities. Trilobites, dinosaurs, stromatolites - all atheist by definition. Did God reveal himself to early lizards? To early primates, sponges or fish? Before the advent of human thought, it was impossible for gods to exist. Surely, sabre-tooth tigers and triceratops witnessed the same things then that we blame on gods today. A mother would see one of her offspring snatched by a predator, whilst it's sibling lived on. A herd of now-extinct herbivores would be startled by a fireball streaking across the sky. All were beyond the comprehension of the non-human minds that experienced them.

The events that drive us to create religions today have been going on for thousands of millions of years. All the witnesses to those events were atheists, but they had not the brains nor the language to create a God to explain them. Wildebeest do not build an altar before testing the waters of a crocodile-infested river. Zebra do not light candles around the skull of a lion, praying for deliverance from predation. Only we Homo sapiens, in this last tiny fraction of the planets history, have had the wit and intelligence to realise that all of these things that have been happening for countless centuries without us are the result of a Divine Will. Only humans have decided that the course of these events may be altered by closing our eyes, pressing our hands together and thinking really hard at the sky. Only the human brain is capable of establishing a two-way connection with the spirits of long-dead animals (also human, coincidentally).

Before humans, all life was atheist. Thousands, possibly millions, of spirit-beings have been thought into existence, thanked or blamed for natural phenomena, and then forgotten. In a blink of geological time, all current gods, godesses and assorted spooks will be gone - probably to be replaced by even more exotic and unlikely creations to take the credit or blame for everything. And so the cycle will continue. As long as there are intelligent beings who remain ignorant of the workings of the world, or are not satisfied with those workings and wish for something more, there will be theism. Gods by the truckload will be created, worshipped and then forgotten - assigned to the waste-bin of mythology. All current religions will die out or evolve, to be replaced by new ones, and the followers of those will look back and laugh that we could have been so primitive in our worship of Jesus or Allah, while they bend their knees to the latest supernatural invention.

There always have been, and there always will be, atheists. From the first self-replicating molecules, to the last galaxy-crossing machine intelligences, there will be creatures that have no belief in Spirits In The Sky.

Religions come and religions go, but atheism outlives all gods.

 

[Dougie]

that statement is wrong, it comes back to your idea that 'nothing is impossible' there is no rock that you can lift but cannot lift somewhere'.

u worded that better this time... i get u!
but it all comes down to where is somewhere? It is purely a definition humans have used! What if there r others out there?

However all god like beliefs... once we dispell alot of the idiocies of some of the claims, come down to 'it's my belief, so i believe it', which doesn't make sense... the reason for you believing in something is not because you believe, just as the reason you like cricket is not because you like cricket.

Y not. I love cicket cause i love cricket! I believe because I do! any proof u get comes later on, and then ur reasons for believing start to pay off.
but who says u can't believe just because u do?!

As stated before, these people are ready to say that science is wrong when they find one problem with it, however we find faults in the other aspects of why they believe..... 'prayer, miracles, etc' and they keep comming up with something else, in the end all that is left is 'I believe because I believe',

Which is fine... but to find out why you believe i think you should do a little soul searching, it's probably for comfort... or because you like feeling that there's more out there... or for a sense of justice cuz u dun like seeing evil people win....or a combination of a bunch of things.

and really everyone has their own reasons for believing. again, it's the individual. It's up to u personally as to what you believe and y? If u've got good enough reasons to justify urself, even if no-one else undertands, then who cares... u have ur belief and that's what counts.

everything is somewhere....

 

[Not-That-Bright]

Yea, but in the end it seems... after the reasons they use to themselves for justifying it are challenged they're left with ' I believe because I believe '. If they're satisfied with that... don't wanna think 'hey maybe i believe for comfort....' then that's ok, i'll leave it to the agnostics to decide that one.

 

[Dougie]

yeah, see! it's up to the individual
and cause evryone's different, no-one can really argue it.
did u say u had an exam today? obv. not eco's... ees?
it's just like no-one can argue my sweeping statement!

 

[Not-That-Bright]

I have Software
It is up to the individual... i do not doubt that you can come up with anything that you wish based on 'i beleive therefor i believe', i just hope that these people REALISE that is all they are basing their belief on... and that the reasons for their belief really are for comfort etc.

 

[Dougie]

and even if it's on confort, so be it. often later, there becomes personal reasons (i know there is for me), but even if there isn't, as long as ppl r happy, so be it

 

[Not-That-Bright]

Yes exactly, accept your beliefs for what they are, don't make up crazy illogical explanations for them.

 

[stamos]

the point that i was trying to make is that ideas can be alive too, and it's unreasonable to ask for tangible scientific proof

Well from a materialist standpoint ideas are not alive, they are a produce by our brain and are bound to matter. Once our brain stops functioning ideas can no0 longer be created.

i don't agree with that

why ideas can be alive:

if an idea transcends the people who initially produced it and lodges itself into the collective psyche of the human race, then it becomes extrinsic to its creators

the idea of god doesn't die when a person who believed it dies
it will outlive all of us, growing dynamically alongside the human race

if an idea does not rely upon any one brain- such as that of 'god'- i consider it to be alive

 

[mugrug]

Wow... someone actually posted a reason, or at least the closest thing to a reason on this thread. Actually the point sounds like a fearful appeal to ignorance really - "we don't know what caused it, so it must be God!", but anyway, here is something that addresses that point:


"There's no reason to suppose a God exists simply because the Universe does. Yes, the start of the Cosmos is a mystery. So what? Powered flight used to be a mystery - up until the Wright brothers decided Kitty Hawk would be a nice place for an airstrip. This is commonly called the God of the Gaps Syndrome: there is a mystery which is so far unexplained by science. Priests everywhere rejoice, and proclaim that said mystery proves God. It's very strange how God keeps leaping from place to place every six months as scientists make new discoveries."

Saying that the existence of the Universe proves the existence of God is a fallacy (question-begging) --

1. Everything except God has a cause.
2. The universe is not God.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Or, if you like --

1. Everything had a cause, and every cause is the effect of a previous cause.
2. Something must have started it all.
C. God is the first cause, the unmoved mover, the creator and sustainer of the universe.

"What caused God? What many people suggest that it is reasonable to believe in God because it solves a mystery: that of who, or what, caused the universe to come into being. However, it just replaces one mystery with another."

I agree, however the theory of space-time shows that space and time are one. This was proved by putting an atomic clock in a jet and flying around the world while another was left on the ground. The clocks timing was out compared to the one on the ground when it returned. This shows that time and space (therefore speed) affects the flow of time. Likewise the closer you get to a dense mass the slower time passes. As light flows into a black hole it is slowed incredibly to the point of the Event Horizon where it has been slowed to such an extent that light cannot "escape" for us to view it. What lies withing? A dense nothingness? I singularity? Who knows? Only further scientific advances may give us answers!

As for the Origins of the universe question the fact is that space and time are one. Thus with no space there is no time.

In the beginning (As the Christians would have it)...


The supposed Big Bang "created" the whole universe.

At the time of the big bang when space/time came into existance and for a relatively short period afterwards (millions of years) the universe was radiation dominated. This meant that all the energy in the universe was in the form of radiation. As the universe expanded from this explosion the radiation "condensed" into matter. Beginning with hydrogen (the simplest form of matter.) The hydrogen clouds, being matter, created a slight gravitational force in the vacuum of space condesing the clouds into spiralling giants which, due to friction, ignited and formed the first stars. Due to the hydrogen fusion that takes place within stars more complex form of matter were created and dispersed into the universe. Helium, lithium, berilium, boron, carbon... etc. As the lifecycle of stars repeated itself more complex matter was created and dispersed in the star's dying explosion. Over time these combined to form togther into large masses. When caught in the gravitational pull of the sun they crashed into each other and combined into large planetoids as is exemplified in our solar system.

From this first explosion, and the cooling into matter thereafter, it is coceivable that the universe is expanding as the law of thermodynamics shows that any finite amount of matter in a finite but increasing space will cool. So the fate of our universe seems to either be that the universe will slow in it's expansion, stop, and be drawn back together by it's own gravity until it returns to it's original state and possibly starts over. Or the universe will expand and basically freeze as the universe expands. Possibly both will happen. I guess we'll never really know, nor need to. It will be long after the human race as we know it has ceased to exist that it will occur. It is often best to ignore such things and get on with our lives.

But the fact remains that there was no "before" the big bang. Space and time did not exist before it. If there was no time there was no before. A simple concept, yes? Time may not be linear anyway. There may be multiple universes (dimensions... to simplify: Think "Sliders") and who knows what laws of physics apply there? We live in a 4 dimensional world. But there are more possible dimension than simply depth, width, height and time.

Imagine the univers cooling as it expands and forming inconceivably large fractals with different parts having different properties... a difficult concept I know. Perhaps our universe came from somewhere where cause and effect has no meaning.

It's a difficult concept... don't worry, I wouldn't expect that most of you would be able to grasp it. Hence religion is a good alternative for you. It's easier and you don't have to think, the church does the thinking for you. Religion is the science of the lazy.

Well, that's the current theory anyway, it's fair more logical and likely than a god. Further Scientific/ technological advancement will answer more questions and bring us closer to the answer. Faith will not add to the glory of mankind.

Go ahead and argue this... showing evidence, of course (as all good HSC students should be able to do by now.)

 

[Not-That-Bright]

But true 'christians' (sorry for targetting you guys again) seem to be more willing to accept the bibles answers, even when a bunch of parts of this can be disproved to cling onto the few that can't, while they'll read what you wrote and come up with an excuse for it and dismiss it immediately.

 

[Not-That-Bright]

i don't agree with that

why ideas can be alive:

if an idea transcends the people who initially produced it and lodges itself into the collective psyche of the human race, then it becomes extrinsic to its creators

the idea of god doesn't die when a person who believed it dies
it will outlive all of us, growing dynamically alongside the human race

if an idea does not rely upon any one brain- such as that of 'god'- i consider it to be alive

Yes.. however gods die... no one prays to Ra anymore?

 

[Dougie]

maybe we should tell these guys to only read the last pg or 2 if they want conclusions!!!

 

[Not-That-Bright]

I wish some people would read a bunch of the pages, because the ammount of people who have said ' i believe because a miracle has happened..' or 'i believe because when i pray this happens', even after i have explained these is unbelievable.

 

[Dougie]

they're only unbelievable if you don't believe and don't have that faith, remember!