More like the atheist who acknowledges that the notion of God has always been a way for people to cope with an incomplete understanding of the universe. The incompleteness theorems prove that the kingdom of science will never completely conquer the realm of God.
There is no “realm of God” any more than there is a God or gods in the first place. And the best way to deal with things you don’t understand is to say “I don’t know”, not to make up lies about it and demand other people accept those lies. Science isn’t necessary to “conquer the realm of God”; just people admitting they don’t know things is enough.
Seriously? There are degrees and qualifiers for miracles now?
You’re positing correlation as evidence of causation, nothing more. Just because you, and others in your attendance, want to believe it was a “minor” miracle doesn’t make it one. That you actually believe what you experienced was more than a simple coincidence is, let’s say, eye-opening.
Ugh, baby atheists are so annoying.
For the sake of argument, lets assume reality is just like the computer game “The Sims.” try as we might we Sim scientist can only get the answers our program was coded to give us. In such a case scientific method cannot give us any clues to how things came to be.
I find this idea pretty silly, but it is a case where scientific method breaks down.
I disagree. The scientific method works fine; people just don’t like the answer it gives.
Well I just burnt down "Sim Der Trihs’ sim house and he ain’t to happy with it. 
That’s right, the scientific method cannot prove the world was created last Thursday by my dog. However it is very effective in figuring out the rules for the world as it is. If a deistic god created the universe in the very manner as shown by the Big Bang theory and inflation, and then never touched it, we’d never tell. But if he interfered like all religions claimed, then we should be able to examine this interference. We see none. So your point doesn’t really help your average believer very much.
You’ve just demonstrated you don’t understand Godel at all. It only applies to axiomatic mathematical systems, not the entire universe. It also has nothing to do with science. You theists really do grasp at straws, don’t you?
You must have owned stupid dogs. My dogs understand things around my house far better than religions claim to understand what god does. They don’t understand how light switches work, but must humans using computers don’t understand how they work either. And of course dogs interact and communicate with us all the time, unlike what we do with God. So, bad analogy.
True, but it was mainly to refute absolutists than bolster average believers.
I wonder if you and Der Trihs appreciate the irony of atheists and theists who carry such similar chips on their shoulders. You find the notion that someone can have beliefs which conflict with yours to be unacceptable. Me, I really don’t care what other people believe. It’s quite a Zen-like attitude.
Have a nice day. 
:rolleyes: It’s about being wrong, not about having “different ideas”. Ideas which they constantly try to force on us, and ideas which drive those who have them to constantly do harm to the world.
And what I “appreciate” is that you are doing the obnoxious Christian patronizing-and-pseudo-sympathetic thing.
But so many people are wrong about so many things.
Some people think Precious Moments figurines are beautiful, some that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, some that any trait a creasure possesses must have an evolutionary imperative.
Why does my being wrong about the existence of God trouble folks so much in particular?
I do think that a lot of wrong has been done in the name of religion (and recognize that’s an understatement). I’m also new here, so if it’s against the rules to ask questions rather than debate I will stop.
Because the believers won’t leave the rest of us alone. Someone who likes Precious Moments figurines isn’t going to pass laws forcing me to buy them, or forbid me to marry if I don’t like them, or ambush me and beat me to death with crowbars because I don’t like them.
Ah, but in this thread it was an atheist who initiated hostilities. And I am not a Christian.
Sigh. You are not getting the point. I guess I should elaborate.
If you trace backward in time the histories of science and religion they converge, if you go back far enough. Religion was just peoples’ attempt to understand the unknown. There was a time when believing that thunder and lightning came from something very large and very mad in the sky was a reasonable belief. People understood cause and effect in their immediate surroundings, but most of what we understand now was unknowable to them.
As we developed more advanced techniques of observation and recording of information, and eventually the scientific method, the area of the unknowable shrank. It was even thought that eventually everything could be explained. Now we know that was wrong. The existence of unprovable theorems has been proven. If you want something more obviously scientific we could substitute information’s inability to traverse a singularity.
Anyway, we now know that, while the area of the unknown is ever shrinking, that it cannot shrink to nothing. This does not prove the existence of a sky-daddy, it just shows that we will always, in some small way at least, be the primitive soul doing our imperfect best to understand our universe. In this way religion and science are similar.
This is how I can be an atheist, and at the same time completely comfortable bowing to convention and using the word ‘God’ as shorthand for ‘the set of all that is unknowable’.
Well speaking only for myself (an atheist to the core) your belief in God doesn’t bother me at all once we’ve established a few things;
1)You and your religion don’t have a problem with me being an atheist.
2)You don’t believe that I’m going to hell because and only because I don’t believe in your god.
3)You don’t believe certain characteristics/traits that people are born with make them sinful (being gay, black, a women, human, ect.)
If we can meet on those things then you can believe all sorts of nonsense and I won’t raise an eyebrow. I won’t agree with you that you’re right either but that’s a debate I leave to others.
That’s true (though those Precious Moments enthusiasts can be very pushy).
But not all Deists or Christians do the bad things you mention. As for Christians, I’d say that anyone who tries to force you to join a religion, or prevents you from marrying whom you choose, or beats you for any reason is acting directly contrary to what Christ required of us.
It isn’t the error of believing in Christ that causes the problems you mention, it’s the failure to love your neighbor as yourself by people who may say they are Christians.
Most do however. Given the chance, they will by majority vote push their religion on people; they’ve tried to do just that often enough. And even the ones who don’t, by supporting religion and the irrational worldview it espouses, they serve as enablers and justifies of the more fanatic.