Okay, to start off, I'm sure I'm breaking Rule #7 in the sense that I'm sure that this type of discussion topic has been made before.

Anyways, I want to hear others opinions on facts that God either does or doesn't exist. I'm having a tough time dealing with my girlfriends' Catholic mother (Bible Thumper).

I believe myself to be an Atheist, one who denies the existence of (a) God. The evidence I have to support my believe is science, although we only prove science wrong when we find results from an experiment that counter there previous results. My high school biology teacher was also an Atheist. He stated numerous facts* that involved biology that prove that there wasn't (a) God. I myself like to prove things using science rather than blindly believing in something. The fact that evolution proves that either God was being funny when he put certain body parts together, or that evolution of organisms is true, disproving God.

If you don't know what evolution is, click here!

I think I've heard just about every possible argument a religious person could make. I've heard everything from "The events in the Bible have been proven correct up to Revelation via archaeology and prophecy." to "Did you know that archeologists dug miles into the center of the Earth and heard human screams?" (Website)

I personally think that it's a bunch of bullsh*t. I've gone to mass with my girlfriend and her parents every Saturday for the past two months. Everything that goes on during mass seems silly to me. To me, it's just a bunch of people gathered in a building, singing, preaching, and eating bad tasting crackers. Now I don't mean to offend anybody, and that was not my intentions. I was just merely stating how I saw going to mass was.

I feel like I'm independent at this point. Like, if proven wrong I'll accept it. I'm not hell-bent (no pun intended) against any particular religion. I just feel that the lack of physical evidence leaves me with a lot of reasonable doubt.



*Some of the numerous biological facts he stated that disproved God using evolution.
Homologous (Similar) Structures
[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Handskelett_MK1888.png/img]

Vestigial Structures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestigial_structures

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 3 2009, 10:58 pm by Brontobyte.

Everything can be explained by "god did it" so it's impossible to use evidence to demonstrate he doesn't exist, since the believer will just say "god made that evidence."

The evidence the existence of god is about as strong as the evidence for the existence of fairies. That's where faith comes in, faith means that you're willing to believe something without evidence.

The whole skeptical paradigm of "I won't believe this unless I can find some evidence supporting it" is completely absent from some religious folk. Hence why they'll also believe in ghosts, alien abductions, and whatever silly thing strikes their fancy.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 4 2009, 3:37 am by Vrael. Reason: removing nonsense

I agree. This is the argument of choice of someone who's desperate in a debate.

I just don't like the fact that people, millions of people, believe in something that can't be proven or disprove. It's just mind boggling to me.

Feel free to answer.

How was the book of genesis written if God was the only human around during that time? I mean, for it to be conceivable, someone else had to have been there. The book is written as if someone were looking at the events as they happened.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 4 2009, 3:38 am by Vrael. Reason: combined posts

God wasn't a human...what happened was God told Adam what happened, and Adam passed the info down through his descendants by word of mouth till someone wrote it all down.

For anyone who want's to read The Book of Genesis.



So God created the heaven and the earth in total darkness. I'm guessing the "light" was referring to our sun. Why would God need to say "Let there be light"? Who was he talking to? The earth currently wasn't populated by anything but God himself.


Why would a "God" need to rest...

So on and so forth about the tree nobody should eat from and whatnot.

Why would "God" let Eve sin? Free will and everything, but why would he let it happen? He obviously knew it was at least a possibility, or one could argue that everything you do is predetermined; God knew Eve would be coerced and eat the apple.

Dude, if there was a glaring self contradiction in Christianity, don't you think it would have been found by now.

Any apparent contradiction has already been thought of by someone else, and explained away. You can't win using this method.

While there are multiple topics pertaining to religion/christianity, there are no topics in the previous 9 pages of SD pertaining explicitly to the existence or non-existence of (a) God. I won't lock this myself unless things get out of hand again. Other moderators may have different viewpoints on the validity of this topic, and I'm not going to intefere should they choose a different stance than mine.

Secondly, I don't know what the fuck you guys were thinking, but if I find another run of bullshit posts like the one I just deleted in this topic I'll be requesting suspensions. None of this "inb4lock" shit or serial "facepalm" posting is going to make the cut in SD. Additionally, this is a very controversial topic based on what I've seen both in real life and in the past SD topics, so toe the line, think before posting, and proofread.

That said, I believe the topic itself is perfectly acceptable as a topic for debate. I encourage posters to give real thought to it, and not simply flake off the ideas of others in this topic, seeing as this particular issue is unsolved even after hundreds of years of human civilization.

Because it is, by definition, unsolvable. Neither side has any real evidence, nor any possibility of getting any, and at the same time, any logic employed to try to convince someone would fall on deaf ears as their belief or lack thereof is ingrained by people they know in real life and experiences over many years. It's like arguing whether the sky is blue or whether we perceive it as blue, but it's actually red.

In that philosophical skepticism sense there would be no solution but if you were to disregard that you can get pretty close to a solution. Since people have different personal beliefs on god(s) you would have to specifically know these traits of their god(s) and work from there.

Some people believe in contradictory traits of god(s) but even if you proof this you will unlikely change the person as he or she probably does not function on logic.
(lets say somebody says their god is an above human intelligence mouse that they have at home which in this case you can disprove by showing that the mouse is not intelligent)

A side note, I think that eventually, like most other things, we will either prove that (a) god exist or that he doesn't through science. Or maybe he will come down and show himself or something. lol

I always like to use the idea that early civilizations believed that by sacrificing animals, it would "please" the rain god(s) and then it would rain. We today, a couple hundred years later, know that to be completely false because of meteorology. You can kill as many as whatever you want and that's not going to effect the jet stream.

I think that's a good example.

"You can't argue with ignorance."
-Reagan Bodey

Some people are so set in their ways that no matter how much evidence and reasoning you give them, they will not change. Thus we have billions of people who never even think for themselves whether God/gods exist. I came up with a "joke" theory a few years ago:

1. When one goes to sleep, his soul leaves his body and finds a new body.
2. The soul takes on the memorizes of the new host and loses its former memories. (This explains why people act differently on different days.)
3. When one is sick, an insane soul is trying to get into one's body.
4. One is dead when an insane soul finally enters.

This "joke" theory has about as much proof as an omnipotent God does. The problem is when there's no hard evidence, people can claim almost anything as evidence.

The idea of an all-powerful god seems irrational to me. If god was all-powerful, he would always know what would happen in each scenario, thus rendering the universe completely pointless. If a god was to exist, he or she is not omnipotent. He or she is probably unconcerned with humans, or cannot change the world like an all-powerful god could. An omnipotent god has no motives; the Greek anthropomorphic pantheon at least has "reasoning" behind their deities' actions.

As for the Christian Bible, I think over two thousand years, the "Word of God" has been corrupted by human error and deliberate modification. If people argue, "But God would not let the Bible change from its original meaning!" then I have nothing to say to them but a facepalm and a direction to a comparison between a King James Bible, a Coverdale Bible, and an Amplified Bible.

I believe this would be helpful in this debate: Agnosticism

@the bibles
Different translations don't matter a whole lot, as long as the essential meaning is still there. The people that want to make sure they are reading a part right, that know enough to be able to see a major problem with a particular translation often know Greek well enough to check against (copies of) the original text.

@the rest
Why is the universe pointless if there's an omnipotent, omniscient God?

How do you know this God is unconcerned with humans?

How do you know He has no motives?

And the Greek gods had terrible reasoning but I see your point.

I don't have the time to reply directly to anyone specifically, but I have some time to lay out my own thoughts, in attempt to conjure some thoughts in others.

Here are my thoughts on whether god exists or not; I only have ten minutes or so to write this, so I'm rushed. Oh well, here goes:

I don't know.

Now that we have that situated, I can tell you all why I don't know, and why none of you will ever know either.

I will not ever submit to a God unless that God is both perfect and infinite.

There will never be two Gods that I will consider worthy of worship, because in order to tell the difference between multiple gods they would have to be different from one another. If they are different, then they aren't the same, and therefor must be lacking something; not infinite or perfect, and as such not worthy of my worship.

Based off of this, I will only consider beliefs that follow the "single god" doctrine, and all other ones are a waste of time (for me).

So now the question of "Why are we here?" comes up. The only plausible reason for a perfect and infinite god creating humans, would be to create something that has the choice to rebel against him or not. I consider all other explanations for a god creating humans not satisfying.

In order for the choices of god's creations to be meaningful, those creations would have to have free will. If God were to make himself known to these creations, so that only the insane and irrational could rebel against god, then that would be interfering with our choice to rebel against him or not. A god would have to make himself known only enough so that a rational belief can be made, as well as a rational disbelief. I'm not saying a perfect 50/50 balance is being kept, but merely that: If God were to make himself undeniably known, then the choice to follow God wouldn't be as meaningful as it could be. I find it to make sense that nobody seems to know whether or not god exists.

Now personally, I don't find it fair that a god would force me into existence without my consent.

I don't know which world view is correct, and I don't know if I will ever come to a decision. For now, I just want to live life as happily as possible.

About the reason God would make us. Again, you don't know what God wants. Who can know the mind of God? So while the only reason that satisfies you is that we were made to rebel, that doesn't make it the real reason.

From what the bible says, the reason we were created was to glorify God. There may have and probably are other reasons, but I don't know them.

And I'm assuming you do? In order for you to know that I don't know what God wants, you would need to know what God wants.

It sounds like you know him pretty well, in order to accuse others of not knowing what he wants.

I did not say that we were made to rebel, but to have the choice to rebel or not. I also never said my reasoning was the correct reasoning anyways.

Oh, so you can know why we are made by reading the bible, but I can't? Also, it's hard to glorify God while rebelling him; that's what I said in my last post -just in a different way.

I'm not saying i know what God wants. What I'm saying is EVERYONE can't know what God wants. You're not the first person to say you know what God wants, but only the Bible says what He wants.

Also, 'Who can know the mind of God' is a bible verse.

Well, there are a few different reasons as to why you could be saying these two things. Although, I don't want to argue as to your intentions. I don't feel that I have the need press this any farther with you, because as far as I'm concerned, you have defeated your own statements multiple times within just two posts.

Actually, I never said that I do. I just said that I know that I will only accept one particular explanation.

Perhaps a better way to say it is 'I'm not saying that what I say is what God wants. But the BIBLE says what God wants, at least in part.'

Granted.

If Science can indeed prove whether a God exists or not, would it not be possible that Science can indeed create a 'synthetic omnipotent entity or race' which in turn leads to the creation of God? Thus, you can all assume that God has to exist, somewhere, or in some time. Then every time, because when you're 'omnipotent'- you could be jumping around in space and time, and thus no beginning and end because you live forever, travel to all time, maybe even all possibilities.
And if you think this is funny, it's not nearly as funny as what this thread is trying to do. Brontobyte, your belief has as much proof as God has. What makes you so sure that even if God existed, it can be proven or disproven with Science?
People seem so sure of logic and reason as if it were absolute, when logic and reason itself is human- and everything human is improbable and untrustworthy.

Not necessarily. He could just know that you are incapable of knowing what God wants, which seems like a logically sound explanation to me, unless you have observed, met, spoken with God, ect.

Just a parallel illustration:
Bob is alone in a windowless room and puts a rubix cube inside a box.
Frank, who was waiting outside with John, enters the room and sees the box.
John enters the room and sees the box.
Frank doesn't know what's in the box, AND he knows that John doesn't know what's in the box.