This is hilarious:
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Atheist or Agnostic?
Yeah, militant agnostics need to kick some atheist but! 
psik
This is the thing. We have no explanation for the existence of the Universe (or what, if anything, came before that.) This is because we have no concept of a thing existing without a cause. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in the Big Bang or God - none of it is ultimately a satisfactory answer. It’s all arbitrary no matter which way you look at it.
Believing in the Big Bang is obviously the more rational of the two - obviously we have good evidence that it happened. But if it did, so what? What caused it to happen? If it has existed forever, how is that even possible? We are missing a very large piece of the puzzle, here. Maybe someday science will be advanced enough to answer this question, but until it does, neither commitment to the scientific method nor religious belief can answer the basic, fundamental question of Why We Are Here.
No, chances are we will all die and never really know the truth, and even if there is a really good explanation for our existence, it probably still makes our existence pretty damned arbitrary. We are a speck of dust on a speck of dust on a speck of dust floating in empty space, and no matter Why you think that is the case, there’s no good explanation for it.
I find this incredibly depressing, but it doesn’t make me less of an atheist. I really can’t blame anybody for choosing a very well-defined set of religious beliefs because it is a much more secure vantage point from which to view the world. Otherwise we’re just hurtling through space and life is meaningless. Not just meaningless, but incredibly bizarre.
So the point of all that rambling, I guess, is that it doesn’t really matter whether you believe in God or not. Both belief and non-belief still leave gaping holes in our understanding of existence.
It is more because of the singularity, and being unable to see on the other side of it. If there is one. Uncaused events happen all the time at the quantum level.
No, chances are we will all die and never really know the truth, and even if there is a really good explanation for our existence, it probably still makes our existence pretty damned arbitrary. We are a speck of dust on a speck of dust on a speck of dust floating in empty space, and no matter Why you think that is the case, there’s no good explanation for it.
Would you feel better if you knew our universe is the result of someone’s science experiment? Is that better than being pinched off of another brane? Religious people want God to have made the universe for them - I wonder how they’d feel learning that the universe was created by a god - a god of another planet, and that we are here more or less by accident anyhow.
We don’t know how the universe came about but we do know how we came about. Does that make you feel better?
So long as believers and non-believers try to be good people – and that means not throwing rocks through each others’ windows – I agree. If my neighbor believes in God, and doesn’t make my life hell because of it, I’m cool.
Real science? An attempt to answer questions, an effort to learn the truth? Yeah, that actually would make me feel better. If I’m just a rat in a meaningless maze, that’s depressing, but if I’m involved in clinical trials that may cure some horrible disease somewhere, that’s good.
It beats the universe being created as part of an experimental avant-garde post-modernist drama!
I heard a great quote the other day that I’ll mangle trying to remember it exactly:
“Without religion, good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things. It takes religion to make good people do bad things”.
That in a nutshell is the potential danger of believing in God. You can pretty much justify anything by saying that’s what God wants.
Often it’s benign (you can’t wear a hat, you must wear a hat) but sometimes it leads to things like the inquisition or inter-sect violence between big and little-endians.
Alas, it isn’t just religion. Many secular ideologies can also lead to nasty and brutal abuses. You could, of course, argue that, once they get that distorted, they are essentially equal to religion. Many said that about Communism.
I was going to point to a big fight I once saw in my workplace about PC vs Macintosh computers. But I’m not completely sure that isn’t a religious issue too!
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It is more because of the singularity, and being unable to see on the other side of it. If there is one. Uncaused events happen all the time at the quantum level.
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This is way beyond my level of understanding. Would you mind pointing me to some information that clearly explains how this works?
But religion provides a unique factor-a leader that cannot be questioned, or even approached. Gods by their very nature do not consult and cannot compromise.
Look up quantum foam - This page is a start, and there is the wiki entry. don’t expect to understand it at first reading! All our instincts about the way things work are useless in the quantum world. But it works - these effects are behind modern small feature size semiconductors, and it has all been experimentally validated.
How about as the result of an alien undergraduate experimental cosmology class?
“Now this week, class, we will create a universe. You all should have your black holes in the gravitational containment vehicle. Don’t drop them or they will bury through to the shield underneath the building.”
Religion is very egotistical. Though they say that God is great, God made the whole universe in order for us to have a place to live, he made us in his own image, and he used to be very concerned with shepherds. The secret is that the universe is not about us.
There are some German and Norse stories about Odin, Thor, and Loki that indicate some willingness to compromise. Some of the funnier Greek stories – like Hephaestus catching Ares and Aphrodite in flagrante delicto also suggest compromise. Ares had to make payment to Hephaestus.
There are a lot of (stories about) gods out there; it’s hard to make any universal declaration about their nature. Look at how many times Coyote has gotten his tail caught in his own traps. (“Meep meep…”)
Well, so long as somebody is learning something from it, it isn’t a dead waste of time. If we were all sprites in a great big old Sega video game, that would be worse!
Agreed. This is the big, ugly, nasty, bitter lesson that the Enlightenment has forced us to face. We aren’t the center of the universe. It amazes me how many people take that as a personal affront.
All this depends on your definition of “religion”. One might call the regime in North Korea religious, or one might call it secular. The problem with that system, as well as religion, Stalinism and others, is that they’re all based on dogmas.
Atheism is probably not the answer to anything, but rather the natural result of the answer to all these issues - being an open-minded and rational person.
Although he doesn’t claim to have the answer to this question, Lawrence Krauss has proposed a model that seems at least plausible (although I’m nowhere near qualified to judge). Since there are so many videos, rather than give a link I’ll just suggest anyone interested search YouTube for “a universe from nothing” and pick one. He also champions science over religion so if you’re interested in that side of things there’s even a video of him discussing this and other related topics with Richard Dawkins.
That’s by Steven Weinberg.
I recently read Krauss’ book, and, while I enjoyed it, ultimately, it was a popularization, and thus more descriptive than really scientific. Lots of excellent discussion, some good metaphors, but in the end, he’s just saying so. Now, I think he’s right. He’s also wise enough to point out that, thirty years from now, everything we think we know today may have been thrown out. It is an excellent book of descriptive science!
It’s sad that the cutting edge of science is so abstruse, even decently educated laymen can’t cope with the real nitty-gritty. Many of the members of the SDMB can’t even do calculus; can any of us work with tensors?
So his position is somewhere between bullshit and cop-out.
But this is silly. Good people do bad things all the time, whether or not they believe in deities, and for a huge variety of reasons that may or may not have anything to do with believing in a deity.
Surely this kind of trite oversimplification isn’t what any of us thoughtful atheists would hold up as a good example of atheist rationality.
Yeah, the nerve of that guy, refusing to take an ideological position on an issue he can’t conclusively prove or disprove, doesn’t feel strongly about, and isn’t particularly interested in. How dare he.
Yes, that wasn’t a very convincing agnostic speech.
Basically he doesn’t want to be put in a box together with ‘in your face’ atheists.
He is not making a case for God being unknowable, he isn’t even an agnostic in the sense that he just doesn’t know whether there is a god or not.
He says he doesn’t believe but is willing to be persuaded by evidence.
I think that 99% of all atheists would change their mind when real evidence would be presented.
Yeah, this is a cop-out. He doesn’t want the bagage attached to him of the image that a large number of Americans hold about atheists.
Sounded to me like he just doesn’t care enough to have an opinion. “I don’t know and I don’t care” is a legitimate answer, after all.
Sure, but I thought he was saying he doesn’t believe and doesn’t care enough to invest any further energy into it. Most emphasis was put on how he wasn’t ‘one of those’.
Well yes, of course. It’s not a scientific paper, but that’s not what 99% of people who are atheist or agnostic will be looking for. It does sadden me sometimes to think of all the fields I’m interested in but would require so much time I don’t have to truly appreciate.
To some extent you’re missing the point. Perhaps it is a bit of an oversimplification. The gist of it is that religion has the power to make people do worse things than they would normally do. You could say a “good” person is no more “good” than the sum of all their good and bad deeds. The vast majority of people will not do worse things than their normal morality would tell them to do. However, give them a religion and a person who would never otherwise kill suddenly has a very good reason to do so. If someone truly believes in the Bible or Koran they could quite justifiably reason that doing terrible things is good, despite all their instincts to the contrary. Abrahamic religions even celebrate this unthinking devotion in stories like the Binding of Isaac. Perhaps, as I mentioned earlier, the word “religion” is a little too specific. Other ideologies with a kind of pseudo-religious element to them have also achieved the same, with the obvious example being Nazism. So you can say that ordinarily good people can do extremely bad things for non-religious reasons, but I would argue that any such ideology exploits the same things in people - the desire for certainty and a strong leader, tribalism and the ability to dehumanize the “other”, and a scary ability to form very strong opinions that fly in the face of logic and reason.