Stop and learn to read. The section you quote is the definition followed by the implications it suggests to the writer.
Red is the definition. Gray is the implications of the definition. You honestly seem unable to read and understand things. This site is for people fighting ignorance. You appear to be defending it.
1> If the universe is finite (yes in duration into the past), then it had a beginning. If it had a beginning, it had a cause. If it had a cause, it had a first cause.
2> Yes it could be a robot. But only if you suggest the robot is uncaused.
3> Other universes have never been observed, neither is there a single shred of evidence to support their existence. I aguess you consider the possibility of such universes to also be a ‘laughable folly’?
The emphaiss is yours. And it is false. The text speaks for itself. It says:
“This definition means that there are no forces, phenomena, or entities which exist outside of or apart from physical nature, or which transcend nature, or are “super” natural, nor can there be.”
I don’t believe you are so silly as to not understand this. I just believe you are depserately fighting for dio’s credibility. It’s a lost cause.
And back to dio’s comments about scientific deceit in evolution…what follows are the final paragraphs of a letter from the Smithsonian about the (since discredited) National Geographic article about archaeoraptor:
"More importantly, however, none of the structures illustrated in Sloan’s article that are claimed to be feathers have actually been proven to be feathers. Saying that they are is little more than wishful thinking that has been presented as fact. The statement on page 103 that “hollow, hairlike structures characterize protofeathers” is nonsense considering that protofeathers exist only as a theoretical construct, so that the internal structure of one is even more hypothetical.
The hype about feathered dinosaurs in the exhibit currently on display at the National Geographic Society is even worse, and makes the spurious claim that there is strong evidence that a wide variety of carnivorous dinosaurs had feathers. A model of the undisputed dinosaur Deinonychus and illustrations of baby tyrannosaurs are shown clad in feathers, all of which is simply imaginary and has no place outside of science fiction.
The idea of feathered dinosaurs and the theropod origin of birds is being actively promulgated by a cadre of zealous scientists acting in concert with certain editors at Nature and National Geographic who themselves have become outspoken and highly biased proselytizers of the faith. Truth and careful scientific weighing of evidence have been among the first casualties in their program, which is now fast becoming one of the grander scientific hoaxes of our age—the paleontological equivalent of cold fusion. If Sloan’s article is not the crescendo of this fantasia, it is difficult to imagine to what heights it can next be taken. But it is certain that when the folly has run its course and has been fully exposed, National Geographic will unfortunately play a prominent but unenviable role in the book that summarizes the whole sorry episode."
Sincerely,
Storrs L. Olson
Curator of Birds
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, DC 20560
Athiesm is not an ideology. it is a doubt about an ideology. Of course you have your position and I believe you are entitled to that, but it is not fact, and that causes more questions than it answers. The agent doesn’t need to be a supreme being,maybe a chemical reaction to another chemical?
There are thousands of ways to consider an existence of a God, hence the many different religions, many contradicting each other. If religion is used for good that is one thing, but now there are some Christian preachers trying(it seems) to stir up animosity by burning the Koran, calling it the work of Satan, then the extremists in Islam wanting to take revenge because they are insulted. Perhaps if either side really trusted in the God they claim to believe in, they would leave it up to This GOD to handle things and just live a peaceful and good life. I wonder if they know it is really the work of another human and just want their own way!
It would take a long post to show the innocent people that God has supposed to have killed, The Flood, Sodom and Gommorah, Joshua killing the people at Jericho etc.; surely there were babies and young children among the dead. A supreme being could have found a better way to help His children. And God didn’t really do anything as far as I can tell, it was some writer or person who blamed it on God. Thinking they were a chosen people. I do not see any kind of a good supreme being that knows all things, created people who (if he knew ahead of time they were going to be bad or disobey His orders or commands) why He would create them in the first place. It seems He is blaming people for His errors that could have been avoided. This doesn’t sound like a loving or all knowing being, and it would be an insult to such a being to say He made it happen!
Love doesn’t need chastisment, if the creator is all knowing. and Killing some one is a little far fetched, when the person or person’s are being judged again after they have died!!
This can be another thread of how the writings of the Bible(no original ones remain) can be anything but the work, thoughts and teaching of some other human…no God involved!
Which would be…? You’ve only told me what God is not.
My response is not predicated on simply my not understanding it. If that were the case, then the ICP would be correct in their assessment of ‘miracles’.
Neither of these phenomenon are ‘magic’, they are in the process of being understood. We know where these things occur and we know that these things are physical. So we know something about these things.
We know nothing about your ‘God’, not even how it’s possible for it to exist in the face of a contradiction (requiring time in order to create time). It seems entirely unnecessary to suppose this God exists since it creates EVEN more mysteries that require solving (this ‘super nature’ where your God resides, how did it get there?).
No it hasn’t, so I’ll repeat:
I’ll be waiting to see if you can make sense of the nonsense position you’ve put forward.
This is called begging the question. You are begging the question on the a series of time. I pointed this out to you before, you ignored it.
Further, how can an agent act upon ‘nothing’? In order for your God hypothesis to make sense, you would require a pre-existing material/space/time to exist. Where did these things come from? If you are putting forth the notion that these things do not need to exist, then please explain what it means to say that an entity ‘created’ something from nothing, at no place, with no time.
Nope. It could be a time loop. It could be causeless. It could be caused by an infinite chain of previous universes. It could be a great many other things. One thing it isn’t however is the result of a Bronze Age myth created by people who thought the Earth was flat and pi = 3.
We have clear evidence that universes are possible since we live in one. That is evidence for at least the possibility of other universes; in fact, I think it a reasonable assumption that there are others since if nature can produce one universe, why would it stop? It didn’t stop with one planet or one star or one galaxy.
i
You God hypothesis however has no evidence that gods are even possible. You can’t point to some other god in order to demonstrate that your God can exist; can point to the universe to show that universes are possible. Despite you trying to equate the two, multiple universes are far, far, far, far more plausible and likely to exist than God.
Here’s the deal aigonz, we have something that needs to be explained: The universe.
Can it be explained? I don’t know - I think it can.
Now, there are many positions on the table. There is the eternal, finite, universe (B theory, eternalism). There is the big bang - big crunch scenario. There is the multiverse. There are a few other theories/models that I haven’t listed.
Some of these have flaws and others seem to be out of popular contention.
That said, there is something to each of these. They are all ‘on the table’, so-to-speak (some may be in the ‘discard’ pile).
God, on the other hand, is not on the table. Just because you - and a whole lot of other people - believe that a magic man can create the universe does not mean it’s on the table of explanations.
You need to explain, at least in general terms (PROVIDE something, in other words), how God created the universe (or could have created the universe).
If you can’t, then even the worst of the theories are better then this ‘God’ theory, since they are at least attempts to explain the origin of the universe.
Admittedly I haven’t followed this discussion. Are you playing horsehoes ferpetessake? When is better(your exact word!) an aceptable surrogate for proof?
Out of the millions of fossils that we have which clearly demonstrate how creatures evolved over time, a handful have been exposed as hoaxes. There was the Piltdown skull, the von Zieten thing you mentioned which I had never heard of, and some feathered bone from China. You also mentioned Nebraska Man, but that wasn’t a hoax, it was a mistake which made no difference in our understanding of evolution. And Java Man? What is the hoax here?
Is there something wrong with that? The Haeckel story is an interesting side note in the history of biology. Students are taught about Lamarckism and how it was wrong, and they should be taught about Haeckel’s discredited idea of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” That was another idea that was incompatible with Darwinian evolution. There’s nothing wrong with showing his drawings in a textbook and discussing how his idea was mistaken.
Why is it nonsense? He said nothing about proof. In fact he specifically said we don’t know for sure. He argues that an explanation that has some evidence (like the Big Bang) is a better choice than an explanation that has no evidence (like God). So what is nonsense about that?
1> There are various definitions of ideology, but most encompass a set of ideas. We can debate the etent of formalisation of the ideology of atheism, however it would seem self evident that it encompasses a ‘set of ideas’.
2> The ‘agent’ that explains the existence of the universe needs to be uncaused. If this agent is a chemical reaction, then the chemicals must be uncaused. But we have no examples of uncaused anything in the natural universe. It is simply my position that the nature of our universe REQUIRES that the uncaused first cause be seperate from it, ie super-natural.
3> Your final points are well made. Indeed I would suggest that God looks down on humanity and groans at times. Yet there is a grand purpose behind all this…another topic perhaps.
1> I have explained what God ‘is’. God is ‘spirit’. God is ‘super-natural’. God is beyond our understanding of time and space.
2> To consider the concept of God to be contradictory is to misinterpret even the most basic definition of ‘God’. God is all powerful, and therefore although beyond time and space, he is able to create time and space.
3> Philosohical theories of time have been around for centuries, and continue to develop. Certainly some aspects of quantum mechanics appear to support the B theory of time, but there are many dissidents. However let’s review yourr claim: “To cause something to exist, is to create something with pre-existing materials/energy within time and space. It takes an agent acting upon something. Now, take away materials/energy, what is there for an agent to act upon? Take away time and how is there any time for an agent to act?” But the issue is ‘first cause’. If physical matter is not eternal, then at some point there is no ‘pre-existing materials’. At some point, something came from nothing in a real physical sense. This goes against everything we observe and know about the natural world.
Atheism encompasses exactly one idea: that I have not seen evidence that would cause me to believe in god(s). That’s it. No tenets, no membership card.
By referring to this as an “agent” you’re begging the question. You’re using a term that pre-loads the answer you come up with as something with agency.
This has been explained to you over and over earlier in this very thread. Quantum events are uncaused. Continuing to repeat your error doesn’t make it true.