Like I said above, the questions that religions try to answer are not questions I bother asking.
I consider questions like “where did the universe come from” as being moot because I do not think we will ever have a clear answer. At least not in my lifetime.
I also said I don’t fully buy the big bang either. I don’t buy it because there doesn’t seem to be solid proof one way or the other. Lots of good ideas but I’ve yet to see anything that said “yes this happened, we have proof, we found fingerprints of big bang”. At least none I’ve heard yet.
That said, what proof does religion have? Christians have a bible that says a lot of stuff written many years ago and translated and retranslated a bunch of times. A book does not make proof either.
Science had evolution. There are some pretty big points made in evolution. Religion discounts evolution. I think religion lost that round.
Let me put it this way. How did we as humans get here? If science proves evolution (which I pretty much think they have), and religion says evolution didn’t happen (which they pretty much do), that pretty much scratches religion off the list as a viable source from which we came. Regardless of the fact that science may not have proven it’s case on how we got here either.
Disclaimer: I’m not a Christian, but I was raised as one and my grandfather was a Russian Orthodox priest. Having said that, I’d like to debunk the idea that God gave man free will. He did not; he explicitly forbade man to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It was Lucifer (God’s employee, as it were), who gave man free will.
That is, if you buy the whole fairy tale, which I do not.
Why is anybody with a post count over 500 even debating in this thread? Surely you guys have seen it all, gone over every minute detail of this issue over and over and over ad infinitum. Religionists have worked for years to silence the doubt they must be having, we can plant the seeds but we aren’t going to convince anybody of anything until they convince themselves. That goes in the reverse too, atheists toying with the idea of finding a way to believe in god are going to be put off by X-ians witnessing, proselytizing, etc.
Yesterday I happened to let it slip that I was an atheist with a couple coworkers at the fireworks tent around. They immediately started in with their astonishment that anyone could not believe in god and went to work on me. Guess what guys, I’ve heard it before. Just like we’ve heard everything that might possibly be said on this thread a million times.
I suppose this is a nice chance for those of us with low post counts building our SDMB presence to let people know where we stand, but I can’t see how it matters much. That I regularly read “Reason” and “Skeptical Inquirer” doesn’t necessarily say much more about me than that I regularly read USA Today’s “Baseball Weekly” or have an endless supply of Nero Wolfe mysteries scattered about the apartment. It depends on what you consider important about a person.
So spare yourself the agony. There’s probably a great, lengthy, informative thread somewhere in the SDMB archives about various arguments for and against the existence of god(s). Why go at it again? Nobody has anything new to say. It’s like this board’s stupid obsession with the Israel/Palestine dilemma. Nothing will be resolved by further argument. As much as I’d like to “fight ignorance” on this subject, experience tells me that most people won’t listen.
BTW, some of the things I’ve seen in this thread are directly addressed at the excellent site linked to earlier:
As all of the true believers know, since the Unicorn is Invisible, we cannot divine Her true colour. Colour is a foul heresy of the Visionista and Heartarians. They are merely sects of the vile Colourists, who, as we of the fundamentalist Achromatic faith advocate, should be forced to wear rose tinted spectacles to learn the error of attempting to assign any colour, let alone Pink, to the Invisible Achromatic Unicorn.
I’m just impressed by the number of factual errors in science and religion that are being thrown around. The serpent in Eden was not Lucifer. Lucifer is mentioned in Isaiah 14:12 as having fallen from heaven, but this just looks like a metaphor for the Morning Star, a.k.a. the planet Venus.
The concept of Lucifer as a fallen angel owes more to Milton than the bible.
The bible doesn’t explicitly say pi equals 3, either. Bible scholars who claim it does are taking a too-literal interpretation of Second Chronicles 4:2. If a giant bathtub is ten cubits across, perfectly round and has a circumference of 30 cubits, then either pi=3 or the guy who wrote the passage (or the builder who designed the thing) just rounded off the numbers in the record. I’m guessing “Wite Out” was in short supply at the Mount of Moriah, circa 950 BCE.
I’m an atheist, but if I was going to argue a religious position, I’d at least try to get my information straight.
The first is about God. The second is about belief. Atheists come in both varieties. Most atheists I know (and most around here) are of the second type. They don’t make a faith statement, they make a lack of faith statement.
It’s really quite simple. If everyone were honest, we would all be agnostics (atheist and theist alike). I consider myself agnostic as to the possibility of God’s existence. But if you ask me what I believe, then I prefer not to be coy about and I’ll call myself an atheist.
glee, get a better dictionary. I for one do not deny the possibility of knowledge of any deity, for who am I to contradict someone else’s mystical experience? Also, I am not “uncertain or non-commital” about my lack of faith. Checking…yep, no faith here. I am an atheist, not an agnostic.
Go even further and ask, why go at it at all? Idols exist; we should all be idolators. But wait, the sun exists; we should all worship Ra. On the other hand, nature exists; we should all be pantheists, right? Yet we aren’t. Since we can evidently disbelieve (in a religious sense) in supposedly real entities just as easily as we can disbelieve in supposedly fictional entities, what difference would it make if we had “evidence” of anyone’s favorite deity (who is, naturally, the One True God[sup]TM[/sup])?
The OP has a theist asking the atheists “how is it possible.” A heterosexual woman might just as well ask the same thing of a lesbian. After all, sex with men is obviously so wonderful. Maybe I just haven’t found the right god, and maybe the lesbian just hasn’t found the right man. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
Bearflag, while scientific theories have not been proven (hence the term theories), some of them come pretty damn close to proof. The only reason that gravity, relativity, etc, are not posited as facts is that science is constantly searching for more truth, for a closer approxiation of the truth. There’s no ‘leap of faith’ invloved in ‘believing’ that the Big Bang theory is probably true.
Religion cannot be disproved, not because it’s ‘true,’ but because it is indefeasible. The grounds on which it is based cannot be logically analysed, because they are not based on logic, but faith.
Also, you are assuming that those who call themselves atheists all ’ belive’ in science. It’s not a straightforward choice between the two. Not believing in one field doesn’t mean you have to believe in something else - some people don’t feel the need to believe in anything. I certainly don’t.
\A"the*ist, n. [Gr. ? without god; 'a priv. + ? god: cf. F. ath['e]iste.] 1. One who disbelieves or denies the existence of a God, or supreme intelligent Being.
Thanks for a more precise definition. ‘Atheist’ at root says nothing more than ‘without God, does not believe in God.’ It says nothing about what I do believe in, or any other portion of my character.
Good arguments have been made to challenge mine. I particularly like the “theory of gravity” is not “just a theory” argument. I’ll have to stew on it for a while and reconsider my position.
Although Genesis only mentions a serpent and does not connect that with Lucifer/Satan, most religious dominations do make that connection. But, okay, a serpent–an animal–gave man free will; my argument that God did not still stands.
I feel compelled to note, as I often do in these sorts of discussions, that the man behind Ockham’s Razor, ol’ William himself, was profoundly religious.
All I’m going to say before I leave is that everyone is harping on the fallacy of religion having no evidence. I assure you if you research it, instead of pointing out minute details out of the Bible, you’d be surprised how much worldly basis there is for religion. In fact, some of the greatest scientists are/were religious men (monks as well as common believers). The reason they always stated for their ease in coming to scientific conclusions was that they know the Creator and how her works. There’s historical evidence that points strongly towards religion. There are miracles that cannot be explained by science, and are well documented in medical records. Matter can’t come from nothing. This is not spontaneous generation (I don’t care if we were crapped out by some giant fly).
The Bible is not ment to be picked apart. So many people love to look at one verse and say, “AHA, He wasn’t PERFECT!” Taking everything out of context and missing the point.
One of the greatest religious thinkings of the twentieth century, C. S. Lewis, started off as an athiest, a very adament atheist that scorned religions. His arguments were most of the exact arguments presented on this thread. He set out, in the grandiose manner of an Oxford don, to disprove religion once and for all, with real factual information. The conclusion of his studies: there was a God. He converted to Christianity. Therefore there’s obviously evidence to support religion.
Dangerosa, nobody died FOR Osama. Those men died for their religion (they want their 77 virgins). No one died for David Koresh or Jim Jones either, they died for their beliefs (wether that be God or Aliens). Those people didn’t die for the leaders you mentioned, they died for their beliefs and their religions.
I started this thread to simply hear the other side, not to ignite some religious battle. The problem hasn’t been solved yet, we’re not going to solve it here. Let’s all just be friends on the SDMB. We’re all here for the same purpose. I’m going to go elsewhere for a while, but I’m sure I’ll be drawn back here. I’m hungover and I can’t focus. I feel like my brain is trying to crawl out of the front of my skull.
I for one do not deny the possibility of knowledge of any deity, for who am I to contradict someone else’s mystical experience? Also, I am not “uncertain or non-commital” about my lack of faith. Checking…yep, no faith here. I am an atheist, not an agnostic.