Hijack continued:
Oops! :smack: Good thing I mentioned it, then. I’ll contact them now…um…well I’ll just contact the first ‘One of Them’ I can find (ha ha).
Please Return to Your Regularly Scheduled Debate.
How can you mess up the definition of atheism? It really is right there in the name itself. You need not go any further than that.
What about atheism has anything to do with matter and whether or not matter ever came from something or from nothing?
How do you explain how your God “just came out of nothing with no cause”?
(Or aren’t you a REAL Deist?)
If the label doesn’t seem to fit you, then don’t use it to describe yourself.
Youtube videos? On-line videos are put together by crackpots and exhibitionists who don’t have the patience to write a book, but who feel they need to get their vapid ramblings out to the public.
Get yourself some books instead.
Of course, it is very difficult for many folks to explain why they don’t believe in something without seeming to be dismissive of those who do. If you narrow your definition "people who want to’explain how they believe that matter just came out of nothing with no cause’ " then you are going to find very few reference works. Most atheists are either agnostic or indifferent to The Ultimate Cause, and accept that we just might not ever devise the theory to explain or the math to describe how everything started. They just don’t feel the need to slap a “God Did It” label on something merely because they can’t understand it yet.
This sounds like the “Watchmaker Proof” for the existence of a Creator: that our world looks like something that was designed by Someone, rather than something that just happened of its own accord.
So the answer is that, to atheists, either the world doesn’t look like someone designed it, or they have an explanation that they find satisfying for how what looks like “clockwork” or design actually could have arisen naturally (such as using undirected Darwinian evolution to explain the varieties of life). (Or, I suppose, another alternative is that they could take it on faith that there is no God of any sort.)
It’s deities all the way down.
Isn’t that the agnostic position?
It is my understanding that that the particles are not created, but relocated. Isn’t that right?
So we don’t get to not believe in the Judeo-Christian God until we’ve answered every possible question that anyone could ever ask? Who makes up these rules? Anyway, back to the atheist lab. We have work to do.
Whom is this in response to? The OP certainly didn’t say anything about the Judeo-Christian God.
An atheist is a person who doesn’t believe in God. That’s it. There are plenty of atheists out there.
Do those ‘atheists’ not believe in a God? If so, then they are ‘real’ atheists.
As to the origin of matter, that’s pretty much a side issue. To be a consistent atheist, the simplest answer to that would be ‘I don’t know’.
If everything happens randomly then why wouldn’t the origin of the universe be random? Also, why does this universe creator have to be sentient?
I’m an atheist and I do not believe that matter just occurred out of nothing. I do not believe in a cosmic origin in the same manner that you apparently do.
No, an agnostic’s “we don’t know” refers to the existence of God specifically.
Not as in “I don’t know how a lightbulb works. But it * could* be God doing it or physical law, I just don’t know”
When I look into my heart there is no belief in God. I never chose to be an atheist. Belief was eroded and chipped at until I woke up one day without, and what’s more, realized I didn’t need it to live a fulfilling, healthy, happy life.
The rest of it - my beliefs about the origin of the universe - are a totally separate kettle of fish.
The depth of the idiocy of this question seems to have escaped those who have wasted time trying to answer it.
“I am so stupid, illiterate and lazy as to be unable to read anything, so I am searching the world’s visual trash heap trying to answer one of the world’s great ethical/philosophical questions by finding a vid-EE-o that conforms to my limited concepts of how someone who says there ain’t no god justifies hisself.”
Next up: looking through Chick publications for an explanation of why some peanuts have three nuts instead of two.
No- atheists don’t believe in a god or gods; this does not preclude an absence of certainty about the circumstances surrounding the origin of the universe.
Coming to the SDMB to find YouTube videos of debates is like going to Saks 5th Avenue to get directions to the Dollar Store.
But to the question at hand:
You are making a leap that is completely unsupported. You are going from “I don’t know how it happened” to “A deity did it”. No doubt this is because our religion-impregnated society has ingrained this idea into you. But I bet with further thought you will realize that it simply does not follow.
Nope, that’s wrong.
They are created out of quantum vacuum fluctuations, as I said.
That’s what Colibri said, no?
The question is one’s position on the existence of God, a Creator. And it seems to me that what Colibri offered here describes an agnostic.
This is not a silly position to hold; it’s the same way I felt when I was younger (and also described myself as a deist). The problem with this position is that something must have caused the something that caused the universe to exist. And something else must have caused the something that caused the something, and so on, ad infinitum. If you can’t accept a natural, random (though not fully explained) origin for the universe, you can’t accept one for whatever you think created the universe either.