Religion, what's the point?

Withnail said:
This the problem. That's exactly the category where I put god but to your mind this is unthinkable.

Unfortunately, I don't believe you can ever have an authentic conversation with an atheist on the existence of god, while you hold that view, because your positions are so diametrically opposed.

If someone sees everything through the prism of religion then they're likely to misinterpret what an atheist like Dawkins is saying.
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You putting God into that category or my mind thinking it's unthinkable is not really relevant. Or logical.
Carolina Red said:
That doesn’t equate to the existence of a god.

Also, what beginning are you referring to?
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Beginning of the universe.

Let me ask you a question.

What evidence would be sufficient for you for a creator?
 
Eriku said:
Theories and hypotheses are falsifiable. The claim of a supernatural creator is not.

You’re a joke the way you keep spilling out falsehoods like this.
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Super being for Dawkins

Supernatural for you

Allah SWT for me.
 
Withnail said:
This doesn't make any sense to me. I've no idea what you are saying here.
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Yeah tbh I don't know what happened there.

I'm having my morning coffee and responding to Carolina red. Press post and that happened
 
Roane said:
Super being for Dawkins

Supernatural for you

Allah SWT for me.
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This isn’t about labels. In order for something to be a scientific hypothesis or a theory it has to be testable and falsifiable. There’s no way to falsify the God hypothesis, ergo it’s not scientific.

No amount of language games can change that.

You’ve already been called out for lying (or at the very least being sorely mistaken) about Dawkins. You really need to stop doubling down on your ignorance.
 
Roane said:
Super being for Dawkins

Supernatural for you

Allah SWT for me.
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Super beings for Dawkins? Back at this absolute bollocks again? There is absolutely no point in debating with you because you just the same thing over and over again and think that's the same as it being true.

It makes the lengthy effort of trying to parse the longer of your posts down to refute your "logic" a complete waste of time, as you'll just do the same.

As for the whole the Quran identified a scientific truth prior to science - that's astonishingly shaky ground for you to stand upon and the fact you'd even try to go down that road makes me wonder if you flew to this thread on a buraq.
 
Eriku said:
This isn’t about labels. In order for something to be a scientific hypothesis or a theory it has to be testable and falsifiable. There’s no way to falsify the God hypothesis, ergo it’s not scientific.

No amount of language games can change that.

You’ve already been called out for lying (or at the very least being sorely mistaken) about Dawkins. You really need to stop doubling down on your ignorance.
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Right before we get into the other stuff.

What have I been caught lying about?
 
Roane said:
Right before we get into the other stuff.

What have I been caught lying about?
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You claimed he’s a polytheist and that he believes in intelligent design. Both are false, as numerous people on here can and have told you.
 
Fingeredmouse said:
Super beings for Dawkins? Back at this absolute bollocks again? There is absolutely no point in debating with you because you just the same thing over and over again and think that's the same as it being true.

It makes the lengthy effort of trying to parse the longer of your posts down to refute your "logic" a complete waste of time, as you'll just do the same.

As for the whole the Quran identified a scientific truth prior to science - that's astonishingly shaky ground for you to stand upon and the fact you'd even try to go down that road makes me wonder if you flew to this thread on a buraq.
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Eriku said:
You claimed he’s a polytheist and that he believes in intelligent design. Both are false, as numerous people on here can and have told you.
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From the words of Dickie Dawkins

What happened befor the big bang? "We don't know"

Also by Dickie

“It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology— and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. … And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.”

I will leave the jibes of the buraq for now as it takes away from Dickies agnosticism and superbeings claims
 
Roane said:
No I don't think it's false. But there are many components to it, some changed some needing work and some that will never be observed (or haven't been up to now). That all takes some leeway with inference or "faith".

The one thing that is clear is science cannot explain away God. Maybe models of God but not the Creator, if you will.

Tbf science doesn't as a whole try and so that, and surprisingly I am happy to acknowledge that and accept it.

The issue is with the response "I don't know" to certain parts of religious belief from atheists and such. Irony being it's the go to line for likes of Dawkins when asked certain questions. The criteria for science is not applied to religious folk. Again I emphasise in some cases I understand why. But not everyone goes to the faith line. Some of us found religion based on evidences for us.

For me it's simple. Can the universe create itself? No. Did it come from nothing? No. That's illogical and for me the answer is a creator, with the fundamental question being purpose of life.

These are my views.
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So who created the creator?
 
Peter van der Gea said:
So the Quran mentioned billions of years?
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Not explicitly but indirectly - the Qu'ran mentions a passage of time which can be translated as an 'eon' (which literally is a billion years), or an 'age' which can be a large passage of time.
 
Roane said:
From the words of Dickie Dawkins

What happened befor the big bang? "We don't know"

Also by Dickie

“It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology— and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. … And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.”

I will leave the jibes of the buraq for now as it takes away from Dickies agnosticism and superbeings claims
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He’s talking about possibilities that are feasible, not what he thinks is probable or likely. And even in your quote he is being clear that any species advanced enough to be a designer themselves would probably have ultimately evolved by Darwinian means. It can in no way be interpreted as supporting the notion that he believes in intelligent design, but is just an example of him bending over backwards to find a scenario where the claim of intelligent design could be justified. And even if you conceded that to be a true assertion, it’s still a far cry from any deity being the ultimate designer of all life, which is what ID is really talking about.

Glad to see you’ve not even bothered trying to back the claim of polytheism.

Edit: I’ve looked up the quote you used, turns out it’s from Expelled, which is a horrendously disingenuous "documentary"

Dawkins had this to say about the interview:

It is the result of deceptive editing.

Dawkins writes at http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/2394

Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.
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If you truly aren’t looking to be deceptive then I’d hope you in the future try to leave your bias behind and to get a solid grasp of the full context. There were enough hints in what you quoted to make it clear he wasn’t saying what you claimed he was.
 
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The Corinthian said:
Not explicitly but indirectly - the Qu'ran mentions a passage of time which can be translated as an 'eon' (which literally is a billion years), or an 'age' which can be a large passage of time.
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A eon is only sometimes used to denote a billion years, and an age is even more vague. To use that to say the Quran is scientific is strawman.
 
Peter van der Gea said:
A eon is only sometimes used to denote a billion years, and an age is even more vague. To use that to say the Quran is scientific is strawman.
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You asked specifically for a billion, which isn't a word that came into existence in the 16th Century. The most appropriate way to describe a significantly large passage of time in these pre-modern civilisations, would be to use words such as 'an age', 'eon', etc.
 
The Corinthian said:
You asked specifically for a billion, which isn't a word that came into existence in the 16th Century. The most appropriate way to describe a significantly large passage of time in these pre-modern civilisations, would be to use words such as 'an age', 'eon', etc.
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I actually said billions, and if the Quran contains the knowledge of God, they could have easily been specific
 
In my opinion the answer to the thread's question is pretty simple. Power, wealth and sex. Personally, I make a big difference between religion and belief. While belief is okay and for many important to survive bad situations in life, to get courage to overcome fears or just to get simple hope in life, Religion was introduced by people for people to control them, exploit them and keep them on their knees.
 
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Peter van der Gea said:
I actually said billions, and if the Quran contains the knowledge of God, they could have easily been specific
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They could have been specific for a word that didn't come into existence until the 16th Century? Older civilisations would have no need to understand the difference between 1 billion and 2 billion. It's an idiotic point.

Using language for approximation on very large quantities is what was done and had been done for centuries. Hence the usage or eons, an age, etc.
 
Kaush949 said:
Who created the creator?
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Spot on.
I have asked this same question of my friends who believe in God. And their stock response is....no one created God because he has created everything...
That just avoids the question by giving such a dim answer.
 
Buster15 said:
Spot on.
I have asked this same question of my friends who believe in God. And their stock response is....no one created God because he has created everything...
That just avoids the question by giving such a dim answer.
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Yeah, it’s called "special pleading."
 
The Corinthian said:
They could have been specific for a word that didn't come into existence until the 16th Century? Older civilisations would have no need to understand the difference between 1 billion and 2 billion. It's an idiotic point.

Using language for approximation on very large quantities is what was done and had been done for centuries. Hence the usage or eons, an age, etc.
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Rubbish.
Ancient mathematicians knew all about orders of magnitude or 10 to the power.
 
Sadly no matter how advanced or sophisticated we become as a civilization I suspect Religion will always be around in some form or other.
 
Ragnar123 said:
In my opinion the answer to the thread's question is pretty simple. Power, wealth and sex. Personally, I make a big difference between religion and belief. While belief is okay and for many important to survive bad situations in life, to get courage to overcome fears or just to get simple hope in life, Religion was introduced by people for people to control them, exploit them and keep them on their knees.
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Exactly. That is why they created the Heaven and Hell myth to keep the gullible in check.
 
Roane said:
From the words of Dickie Dawkins

What happened befor the big bang? "We don't know"

Also by Dickie

“It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology— and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. … And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.”

I will leave the jibes of the buraq for now as it takes away from Dickies agnosticism and superbeings claims
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What point do you think you're making with these quotes?

How exactly is not knowing what happened prior to the Big Bang some kind of gotcha? Do you think he should just make something up?

The second quote simply throws into stark how ridiculous the origins of your claims of Dawkins being a polytheist are. You really are equating the hypothetical possibility of advanced species with far more advanced genetic manipulation with belief in a pantheon of gods. Furthermore, you're actually stating Dawkins believes this to have actually occurred rather than it being a hypothetical conjecture. It's just the worst kind of bad faith deliberate misinterpretation at worst or a chronic misunderstanding at best. Have you been reading creationist websites?

My "jibe" about the Buraq is that it is pretty shaky ground to claim a 1.5 millennia old religious text has divined the nature of the physical Universe. Just because one aspect of the text may happen to chime with current scientific understanding is not a validation of the texts claims about nature, nor that science has only just caught up. The Buraq reference is to point out that, as an example, flying horses, which clearly do not exist and never have existed, somewhat undermine your positioning of the Quran as a source of information of the physical reality of nature and its laws.
 
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The Corinthian said:
They could have been specific for a word that didn't come into existence until the 16th Century? Older civilisations would have no need to understand the difference between 1 billion and 2 billion. It's an idiotic point.

Using language for approximation on very large quantities is what was done and had been done for centuries. Hence the usage or eons, an age, etc.
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The concept of numbers as high (and much higher) than a billion goes back to at least Archimedes time and no doubt earlier.
 
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Eriku said:
Glad to see you’ve not even bothered trying to back the claim of polytheism.
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No, it's worse than that. Because there would be more than one of these hypothetical aliens then that is multiple gods, hence polytheism. The quote is being used to justify claims of Dawkins being both a polytheist and a creationist.
 
Roane said:
Beginning of the universe.

Let me ask you a question.

What evidence would be sufficient for you for a creator?
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1. I get that, but specifically what beginning?

2. Which creator?

3. What evidence would convince you that the Biblical story is right and not the Koran?
 
Am I right in thinking that religious people, in your case @Roane , Muslims believe that the infinite knowledge of God is in the Quran?
 
"God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller as time moves on"

I honestly don't understand how people can reconcile what we now know with what ancient people jotted down on some paper.
 
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