This is a problem with “supernatural”. That’s why I put quotes around “natural” in my original post. Once it applies to everyone, I’ve got a hard time classifying it as supernatural. AFAICS it becomes just “unknown”.
It’s not my business to prevent anything; I’m not responsible for the design of the universe. I’m just saying, it’s certainly possible for an infinite universe to lack planets covered in chocolate, the same way it’s certainly possible to have an infinite string of letters that never contains my name; lots of infinite universes are filled with planets covered in chocolate, and lots of infinite strings of letters contain infinitely many instances of my name, but some don’t have any.
I understand the argument, but as far as I can see, the universe isn’t ordered enough to prevent chocolate covered planets. An infinite string of “really random (oh dear)” characters will certainly contain your name. And all of Shakespeare’s plays. Etc. Infinity is creapy that way.
It does depend on the assumptions you’d make on the universe (including the amount of time available), that’s true.
I just don’t see that as being the same. Then again, I don’t know much about physics.
I do agree that it would have to be imcomprehensible to everyone to be evidence of a higher being. There’s really nothing about the idea of time having no beginning and going on forever and ever that you can’t quite grasp? I mean, stuff has to come from somewhere! What the hell is the universe? Even if it all came from the Big Bang, where did that come from? We can’t know that. Once the universe was established, nothing else that I’m aware of seems unknowable to me, but the origin and extent of it?
But I’m not saying that “God did it” answers those questions, because obviously it doesn’t since God would have to come from somewhere too.
But if it’s finite, what’s outside it? And if THAT is finite, then what’s outside of that, and so on? I don’t see how this can make sense to anyone.
The universe is an island surrounded by whatever it is that surrounds universes.
We don’t know. It’s quite possible that we can’t know. Gonzomax is right.
And I note that it’s perfectly possible for the universe to be infinite AND there to be “something” outside it.
Speaking for myself, I find the idea that time has a start at least as hard to grasp as the idea that it hasn’t. And the current consensus seems to be that time did start at the big bang (but this is “just” the consensus).
We don’t know.
Says you 
Sixty-odd years ago, the thinking was that the universe didn’t have a start. Or an end. We’ve gone a long way to finding ever more interesting questions.
Besides, wasn’t there already a LONG thread about this concept already?
While there are hard atheists, who believe affirmatively in a lack of God or the afterlife or whatever, I think most atheists are soft atheists, effectively agnostic - while they will acknowledge that intellectual rigor demands that they respect the notion that theoretically something that is unprovable could exist, they also realize that they are under no obligation to give the notion any likelihood. More likely they are not proud per se of being atheist, but more strictly they have pride that they are not theists, since theism is silly and for the most part easily debunked.
There are a million silly unprovable notions in the world, and most of them contradict many of the other millions of silly ideas. And hey, every once in a blue moon one of them turns out to be correct and provable. But none of them deserve the attention of anyone besides enthusiasts and fiction writers until such time as they get demonstrated.
OTOH I do think research of odd things is worthwhile. But the research should be from the viewpoint of explaining something that is known to have occurred, rather than trying to find things you wish were true, or fanwanking increasingly ridiculous stories to explain away the mountains of hard evidence that contradict your pet story.
To answer the question another way, it’s not so much that people are so sure of their non-belief as that they are so unsure about your pet belief.
Yeah, I understand the athiests position and it is perfectly reasonable. I am even willing to admit that it is more reasonable than having faith. I don’t think any religion has got it perfectly correct and I suspect that despite thousands of years of human creativity and imagination, none of them are much closer to the truth than the pink unicorns but I also suspect that there is something.
Perhaps, my vision was simply my conscience talking to me through a proxy. Perhaps my brain conjures a God when I need to talk to a God. Perhaps we will discover that there is a little part of the brain that is different between those who have faith and those who do not. Perhaps it is genetic and perhaps there is an evolutionary advantage to having faith (perhaps it is linked to the same gene that gives us immunity to some disease that killed off anyone without that resistance, perhaps faith makes you more likely to conceive), but there must be something more than “God simply doesn’t exist and 90% of humans are just being silly”.
Not really how faith works. If you believe the Christians, then faith is a gift of God, you can’t attain it through good works or endless hours of praying unless God grants it. And I would add that it is equally difficult to get rid of just by trying.
OK so because my faith in grounded in this vision I had one time 20 years ago when I thought I saw God (or at least felt his presence very vividly) I am not psychotic, I am merely delusional?
That is a good point and perhaps God is useless to us if we are incapable of understanding God or understanding his morality but if you believe he exists why wouldn’t you strive to understand him to what little extent you could.
That is a pretty grim prospect, most of humanity is insane.
No but there has been a pretty consistent belief in a spiritual world.
Yeah the whole “why do bad things happen to good people and why does evil prosper?” is hard to explain.
Yes, I think that is what I am saying. How does 90% of humanity come to believe in higher power.
Well some people have visions and stuff.
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Of course. The fact that we equate popularity with plausibility is one of the big reasons religions exist. It’s also one of the reasons that pretty much every culture has sprung up with their own religion. You would expect, in the absense of an actual god, that people would form religion - and how does that look any different from our real world where even believers think there are 100 false religions and one real one?
So you think that the movie “the invention of lying” basically has it right?
Is it really all just a reflex to prevent ourselves from going crazy about the prospect of death?
I think it is entirely possible that they are all wrong on the particulars, my question is why so many people believe in religions. I was not on deaths door or afraid of death when I experienced something (whether you think it was a phsychotic break a hallucination or God) that made be a believer for the next 20 years. I suspect that a lot of people’s faith is not driven by the concept of an afterlife, its sort of the reason why I still fear death despite having faith in the existence of God…
Because it is so singular in its persistence over time and across cultures and so prevalent that it is something that might deserve a bit more discussion than “you might as well believe in pink unicorns”
Can i say God triggered the Big bang?
Some people see it all around them every day. If you are asking why priests can’t read minds and shoot laser beams from their eyes i guess i’d have to say that God works in mysterious ways.
That’s what makes them miracles
Some religions don’t really have Gods.
Well, tell that to Mohammed and the Muslims or to John Smith and the Mormons or to Tom Cruise and the L. Ron Hubbardians.
There are plenty of religions that have afterlives without a God. Buddhism or Huna are two examples.
There once was a time when people believed in a static and infinite universe. As we learn more, as our understanding changes, our belief changes. Perhaps the evolution of religion is like this. As prophets enlighten us, our understanding of God changes too.
Infinity only mean that anything that is possible will exist somewhere. For example, pi is supposed to go on forever with no discernable rhythm or pattern but none of the digits is every going to be an ampersand. In positing God, we are not saying something about the digits of pi we are saying that someone drew that circle.
And there’s no reason at all for you to “suspect” any such thing.
My opinion; “faith” probably became a survival advantage due to thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years of believers systematically killing anyone who didn’t praise religion loud enough. Selective breeding in action; we’ve bred ourselves to be insane in a specific way just as we’ve bred some dogs to have long fur or specific behaviors.
This. It’s conceivable that a fire-breathing magical dragon is living in my garage, but it’s just hiding whenever I go out to look for it. It’s conceivable that there is a Supreme Being which created the universe. It’s hard to measure relative probabilities on statements like this, but at a rough guess, I’d estimate the dragon theory to be at least one thousand times more probable. In any case, I would be perfectly happy to say that I’m ‘certain’ that both of these theories are false.
If someone wishes to say that my unwillingness to assent to the statement that the probabilities of either of these statements being true is exactly 0, means that I’m ‘really’ agnostic about the possibilities, they should feel free. But I can’t imagine what things they would consider someone to be certain about. Personally, I’d rather reserve the word ‘certain’ for some meaning that allows it to occasionally be used in a positive sense. In this case, I’m confident enough that I’m willing to bet–and apparently am, in fact, betting–my life and immortal soul that I’m correct. That level of confidence = certainty, by any definition that’s reasonable to me.
AFAICS part of a built-in mechanism for belief in invisible actors is quite easy to understand. If you’re walking around on the savanna and you hear a creaking branch and you think it’s something (possibly unseen) stalking you, you’re more likely to survive than if you think that it was probably just the wind.
Humans have an enormous preference for seeing and stating actions in terms of intentional beings - even when it’s completely clear there isn’t any intent or being. When people want to be clear that there isn’t any intent, the language becomes a lot clunkier when describing actions. Listen to any programmer explain her code, or a physicist explain the attractions of electromagnetism and you’ll usually hear examples of both.
Dawkins has suggested that another part is that young children are necessarily gullible. They need to believe what other people tell them or they’ll quite probably die quickly. This gives a possible mechanism whereby children are very likely to accept their parent’s beliefs as their own (which is what we see everywhere) and also might be a reason there is a widespread acceptance of mythological parent-figures that will tell us what to do and punish those who “fail”, even if that parent figure appears completely psychotic and unreasonable.
This is one of the key’s to the whole thing for me. Religions in general are so clearly the product of ancient humans attempting to understand and give meaning to their lives that it’s just incomprehensible to me that someone could actually believe the stories to be true. How can you be a human living in a modern society, with all of our science on the one hand and countless examples of the human storytelling on the other and not come to that conclusion? It’s like believing Ulysses to be factually correct or Harry Potter to a true-to-life account of a boy’s youth at a school for the magically gifted.
The second issue is one of philosophy - I don’t believe something termed ‘God’ could exist from a conceptual standpoint. Science is based on the fact that the universe operates in predictable ways, and if ‘God’ exists it would have to be explainable in some fashion. OTOH, if it’s an explainable phenomena then it can’t be ‘God’ - Christianity in particular has a definition of ‘God’ that by definition cannot exist, perhaps this is deliberate? So once again you have the entire history of mankind’s scientific achievements on the one hand and on the other you have some stories.
I would happily believe (given evidence) that a god-like entity existed, but it would have to be explainable (since it exists in the first place) and it wouldn’t be the ‘God’ that man has imagined for himself.
So, some physicists are strongly opposed to the idea of an infinite universe? Would they prefer us to be in an enclosed universe suspended in nothingness?
And then, later in that post:
So what, exactly, is the particular feature that’s “singular in its persistence over time and across cultures”?
A belief in the unfathomable? Or, even more arrogant, or pig-headed, a belief that the unfathomable is understandable by mere humans, animals that only just recently invented toilet-paper.
As I’m sure has already been pointed out many times, agnosticism and atheism are not exclusive positions.
As to my confidence, I’m as confident that your god doesn’t exist as I am that zeus doesn’t exist.
Does that mean I’m certain of this? No, but I’m not losing sleep over it.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “unfathomable”. Some religions posit unfathomable gods; others posit downright fathomable ones. (The gods of ancient Greece, for example, come across like comic-book characters IMHO: they have recognizably human personalities and use impressive but straightforward powers: throwing lightning around, wearing a helmet of invisibility, causing earthquakes, changing into a bull or a swan at will, that sort of thing – and they plainly spell out what sort of propitiation will keep you in their good graces, sure as they go around committing adultery or competing in the occasional beauty contest or whatever.)
If you think religion is a belief that the unfathomable is understandable, then I have little to add.
Well, there are no (other) infinities in nature. And I don’t know if we can even in theory tell the difference between an infinite universe and one that’s just larger than the observable part.
And as I said above, making the universe infinite doesn’t answer the question of what (if anything) is “outside” it.