I think it's a question everyone ought to consider, and I'm sure at some point in their lives everyone will consider (provided they reach an age that allows it). Logical and rational thinkers reach different conclusions not on the evidence unavailable to them, but on the evidence available to them so I don't think belief in God should be dismissed as some kind of anachronism.
Religion, what's the point?
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I think it's a question everyone ought to consider, and I'm sure at some point in their lives everyone will consider (provided they reach an age that allows it). Logical and rational thinkers reach different conclusions not on the evidence unavailable to them, but on the evidence available to them so I don't think belief in God should be dismissed as some kind of anachronism.
I think this is the crux of your problem. Every one of the things you state as a counter belief system is, in fact, a repudiation of a belief system prefaced on the first point of rejection.
If you don't believe in god you can't believe the world was created by god, that god can give us morality or that gods son existed.
I think all religious doctrines dismiss the other religious doctrines at some point down their line of claims, it is just that atheists go one step further back and dismiss all religious doctrines because of the first claim.
To function in the world everyone thinks as atheists do about almost everything. If there is no proof of something we dismiss the claim until there is. Otherwise, we would all be buying a huge amount of face cream. Religious people just don't apply the same standard to their pet religion.
If we didn't previously have religion, who's to say someone wouldn't propose the concept of a creator today?
Contrary to popular belief, the idea of a God who is responsible for the creation of the Universe is not actually incompatible with science.
New gods are created on a regular basis. Hence why your god is different to other thousands of gods.
Well yes that supports what I'm saying. The idea of a God isn't exclusive to religion. If religion doesn't exist there would still be theories as to whether there could be a creator of the universe.
They might very well propose the concept of a creator, but it wouldn't get off the ground in modern day society to the point where thousands of monuments were built to worship him.
Religion was allowed to get a foothold in society at a time when there wasn't much around to stop it. As said before, education, technology etc wouldn't allow that now.
Yes I agree with that.
As a religious person I would that's why the timing of the 'prophets' was as it was.
The sentence "god created the universe." is completely devoid of meaning unless you make further assumptions that are either equally meaningless or false. Religion is not a theory and makes almost no claims about the creation itself anyway. Everytime religion was tested, it was disproved so it makes no sense to believe the parts, that cant be tested.
What exactly was disproved?
As for God creating the Universe, well yes Scientifically it is devoid of meaning. However according to religion it is significant because it gives an explanation as to the why and what the meaning of life is.
1) Yes, the repudiation of a belief system, which in turn informs your own belief system.
2) Simply asserting so doesn't make it true.
I don't think it's devoid of meaning at all! It means, for starters, that the universe was created as opposed to eternally existing.
I failed to articulate my thoughts properly.
I tried to make an argument against this statement:
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I think it is false. There is no credible scientific theory that would make this statement, because it would explain nothing without further assumptions; yet there is no evidence at all for anything like a "creator". Any assumptions that fill this term with meaning, would be random. That would not be good science.
It depends on what religion we are talking about. We know that Helios or Apollo are not actually dragging the sun around with their chariot. We know about Christianity that resurrection is not possible. At the end of the day every religion makes claims that contradict science. The only thing that doesn't contradict science is a "creator god"/"god is the natural forces". But that would be a empty statement again. So the gist is: Not even a creator god makes any sense.
Fortunately nowadays we can make rational statements about the beginning of our universe, even so these ideas are still very raw.
Yes I agree that such a concept wouldn't get far as mentioned above. The point I was trying to make is that the 'concept' of a god isn't exclusive to religion, and would undeniably be proposed by a modern scientist at some point. However the scientific community would reject it almost immediately.
The bolded bit is generalising. To assert such a statement, you have to know every religion.
Both things you write are technically true, but not really an argument.
I don't think the passage is automatically true because Marx has written it, but because to me it's one of the best descriptions of what religion is content-wise. And the number of people who agree with it has nothing to do with the question if these assumptions are correct or not.
If Brian Cox is correct that as ghosts have no physical presence they must be energy. Energy would dissipate quite quickly (thermodynamics and all that) so for ghosts to exist we would need to find a mechanism that allowed energy to be added to or stored by the ghostly entity. And this mechanism would have been revealed by the hadron collider therefore ghosts can't exist. This must mean that gods must also not exist.
Not sure many religious people will be convinced by this argument.
Not sure many religious people will be convinced by this argument.
It pretty much is.
Religion is us lying to ourselves to give our life meaning.
Depends on your concept of exactly what the God is. Some aren't, some are.
I got asked this question by a Christian who was pretty accepting of science and it's proof and it really did get me thinking.
How do you define what was there before the big bang started?
I mean, I don't believe in God or heaven and hell or anything like that but I can't wrap my head around what started the whole thing off. It may very well have been answered well enough but if not then it's so ridiculous and miraculous that just maybe there is some sort of God, although what definition of God it equals I don't know.
The conditions needed to start off the universe from absolutely nothing are beyond comprehension if you start thinking about where they came from to begin with and where the absolute beginning of everything is.
I always wonder as well, how did religion start? Imagine being the first person who created the Bible and all the stories and looking at it now, they'd be pissing themselves if it wasn't true and we still have a sizeable quantity of the planet believing in it.
How do you define what was there before the big bang started?
I mean, I don't believe in God or heaven and hell or anything like that but I can't wrap my head around what started the whole thing off. It may very well have been answered well enough but if not then it's so ridiculous and miraculous that just maybe there is some sort of God, although what definition of God it equals I don't know.
The conditions needed to start off the universe from absolutely nothing are beyond comprehension if you start thinking about where they came from to begin with and where the absolute beginning of everything is.
I always wonder as well, how did religion start? Imagine being the first person who created the Bible and all the stories and looking at it now, they'd be pissing themselves if it wasn't true and we still have a sizeable quantity of the planet believing in it.
But bananas fit perfectly in your hand and have a tab at the top, just like a soda can, to help you open it easily. Not sure how Brian Cox can argue against god's existence with evidence like that.
This ambiguity is a way for religious folk to justify their belief in the face of logic and fact. When things get tough and someone that knows what they are on about presents evidence that puts religion in it's place, resort to ambiguity.
So this argument amounts to 'Ghosts don't exist, therefore God doesn't exist.'
I find this rather weak, to say the least.
If you were seriously contemplating a Creator's existence, you could, for starters, infer He is immensely powerful. You could infer He is immaterial. You could infer He is timeless (eternal). You could infer He is personal.
I'd be interested to know if any theist has ever used the banana argument, or whether it's typical straw man mockery. All the same, it raises a smile.
No. It is logical argument about entities that aren't physical.
Yeah, but imo there's a big difference between accepting that divine providence/divine intervention/miracles/God's-will is a substitute for unexplained science, and accepting the entire concept of God. I think events and circumstances beyond our current understanding can justifiably referred to as effects of God.
God (source of all discipline and self-consciousness) being a spiritual force that demands obedience/loyalty/worship, to escape or transcend some kind of karmic judgement system, isn't something I can wrap my head around.
Well there are hundreds, if not thousands of different Gods that are/have been worshipped. Some Gods are clearly not compatible with science, some are, which is what I was getting at. We also don't know everything about science, we still have a very long way to go. What evidence was you referring to that puts religion in it's place... Any particular religion also?
Does it? How so? A God is a supernatural being who doesn't physically exist and created and/or controls the physical to varying degrees. However you define it it is pretty much at odds with Science.
Huh? What on earth has the shape of a banana and a creationists idiotic view of "purpose" got to do with anything? Cox is making a very serious point. The only alternative to physical is energy and something that is purely energy need that energy to be constantly topped up/stored or energy will dissipate quickly. If this is the case there must be a mechanism and there isn't.
The problem with this question is that it assumes that if you don't know, then it must be a magical being in the sky. The leap it takes from 'we don't currently understand' to 'therefore it must be magic' is spectacular. It's literally the same logic as 'they must be a witch' which led us to burning people.
So not physical then. So "he" must be energy. There are no other alternatives.
Yep. We don't know all of the details so any old fiction is a likely to be true as anything else.
But that's now one concept of God.
Yes, and logical arguments with weak premises are weak arguments.
Yes. Ray Comfort. Watch him on youtube.
Immaterial, spaceless, timeless = outside the universe. He created the universe and is therefore not bound by its laws.
Within the universe, He came to us as Jesus. Material.
Interesting, I will!
Banana's though.
My point was, albeit I was being facetious, using that kind of evidence and reasoning is often pointless as they don't care.They have faith and that's that.
You can use science to indirectly infer His presence. The scientific enterprise is a necessarily naturalistic one. God being supernatural, you won't get much joy from looking for scientific proof about Him.
Science isn't the only path to knowledge!
Sorry for being so late in replying...time is not my own to spend currently. Please forgive my ill manners.
Believing that Jesus existed, that the historical accounts of what he claimed and whether those claims are true as reported in the Bible, stems from only one faith system and that is Christanity. Jesus is positioned differently in Islam and your interpretation of Jesus in that context is informed by your Islamic faith. There is no question of faith in this matter to be an athiest - again, you're seeing this from a Christian perspective. The other two thirds of the world's population did not have to challenge their faith regarding Jesus. I don't see my belief system as being informed by a lack of belief in Christian mythology anymore than I do in my rejection of Odin's existence - they are a series of hypotheses I have rejected, but do not in of themselves shape my world view.
As a side point, I would not even be confident in what Jesus even said, given that there are no contemporary reports of his words that survive, never mind believing that he is what he claimed to be. Choosing to believe claims written in texts that are known to be written long after the event, influenced by human politics and heavily edited and rewritten is certainly a matter of faith - and it would be exactly such faith being maintained despite overwhelming evidence that source is to be treated with suspicion (and this not to dispute that Jesus existed or that he was Yaweh incarnate which can be true or not true irrespective of scripture) is exactly the sort of position that is at odds with scientific discipline. Please do not read this in such a way that you feel I don't think the Bible contains wisdom, wonderful writing and is a book of immense value - it is all of these things, but I trust it's veracity in the same way I would Herodotus.
This is but an example of potential incompatibility between scientific method and religious belief (but, to be clear, I'm not arguing that some individuals reconcile these matters, although to do so they must jettison or alter how they interpret certain elements).