Always a fun topic . 
Just state your belief system. Not just your religion, but what you believe about God, death, afterlife, Prophet(s), and anything else that is part of the topic.
Is this another one of those “debates” that you’re going to abandon? If not, please demonstrate your good faith participation.
What Libertarian said.
Your turn first, Sinful.
I believe in God. I consider myself rational, but I have seen too many things in my life to accept that science is “better” at answering my questions.
There are people that argue there is no God. If this is true, why does nature have structure? Who said everything that goes up must come down? Who says an object in motion stays in motion until acted upon by some other force? Who designed the human body?
Did everything come out of chaos? Where did everything come from? Was every molecule just floating aimlessly, every adom, until gravity pulled so many together they formed eventually a planet or a star. Then eventually water and single celled organisms, and one day millions of years later, man evolved?
I don’t think so. I believe something created everything. If I took off my watch and took apart every piece, then threw the pieces on the ground, would they eventually over millions of years become a watch again? But science would have me believe that once there was nothing but molecules floating aimlessly through the universe. Oxygen, hydrogen, and they collide to create.
I just don’t buy it. The parts of the watch didn’t come together over millions of years to form a watch. The watch maker made the watch.
Personally i think religion has made my life alittle better. I have witnessed first hand how religion can be both a blessing and a curse for people. I used to believe that religion did more harm than good, but today I believe that religion plays an important part in our society.
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Everyone at some point in there life will wonder what their purpose in life is.
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Everyone is afraid of dying (if you deny this, I will seriously doubt you).
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Everyone faces choices between “good” and “evil”.
I think religion helps with all three of these questions and more.
Ever hear of suicide, Sinful? I know, I’m denying what you are saying, and you’ll doubt me. Well, doubt away.
Sinful
Your position sounds too close to a god of the gaps for my taste. The questions that God answers are moral ones concerning life and death of the spirit, not amoral ones concerning life and death of the atoms.
Believe it or not, there are many scientists who find no conflict between their love of God and their love of science. Structure need not have arisen fiat ex nihilo. Since God is eternal, there is no reason that he could not have allowed his creation to stew for a googal millenia until it formed sentient creatures with limbic systems. All that was required from Him was the creation of something from nothing.
Religion itself, like the universe, is amoral. But it can be used either morally or immorally to serve either God or man. There are people of faith who feed the hungry and minister to the sick, but there are also religion politicians who use the Bible, the Qu’ran, or the Torah for personal gain and the exercise of power.
Just as you will render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, render also unto the scientists that which belongs to science.
Desmo
I’m not supporting what Sinful said, but a person might kill himself and still be afraid.
Point taken Lib, I just didn’t know where else to start. I like your answer better.
How about replying with something longer than one sentence?You need to offer reasons if you disagree with somebody’s arguments, otherwise what you’re saying isn’t even the slightest bit rationally compelling. You might find what I have to say absurd, if that is the case, offer me some reasons or counterexamples as to why you find this to be the case.
Sometimes it only takes one sentence. That was the case with his answer. You claimed that everyone is afraid of dying. He provided a counter-point that disproved that. It’s not his fault that your point was so easily overturned – it’s yours.
Of course not – but if you’re making an analogy to what I think you’re making an analogy to (i.e. naturalistic evolution), then your analogy is, to put it mildly, quite flawed.
If you took apart every piece of, say, a beetle, and threw the pieces on the ground, they also would not eventually over millions of years become a beetle again. (In fact, they wouldn’t last for millions of years – they’d bio-degrade before the decade was out.) If you went back in time to a point before beetles evolved, and interfered in such a way that the first beetles never arose, this does not mean that something else wouldn’t arise to exploit the ecological niches that beetles fill today. Maybe that something else arose from early spiders, and so had 8 legs instead of 6, but otherwise was capable of doing everything that beetles do. We’ll call it a Zeetle. If you then went forward in time and returned to the present, you’d see entomologists marvelling at the perfectly-adapted zeetles that roam the planet, and some of them might even be so brash as to say, “Look, the zeetle is the perfect match for its surroundings! No creature so complex could have arisen by chance. God must have engineered the zeetle as part of His master plan!”
And then they’d check the time on their wrist-zwatches.
You might want to read Jim Huber’s Parable of the Watchmaker.
The only thing that I believe for sure is that I don’t know if a God exists or not. For me to say that I did believe would be my telling a lie. I do think that if God does exist, in a form that understands me, then God will know that I am bieng only honest.
Now just maybe the story of the watch coming together seems " far fetched" but we measure this only by what we know, have experienced or can imagine. There can be two explanations for this, one being that an event like that is very unlikely to happen without a divine guidance of some sort or, maybe it is not so complex after all but our understanding and imagination are limited so much that it makes it seem nearly impossible.
Could it be that we are not as smart as we like to think we are therefore rendering us completely incapable of understanding. It seems that this might be the case since many base there belief in God in a particular form on “faith”, and faith being “belief without evidence”.
Well, I also believe in God, and I consider myself rational. As such, I will address the various points you make in your post.
Well, when you ask this, you make a basic flaw by saying that things fall “down.” Strictly speaking, things can’t fall down because down does not really exist by itself, only in relation to other things. Rather, things fall “towards.” For example, if I am on the south pole, and I drop a bottle of Jack Daniels, from my perspective, it is falling down. but by another perspective, it is falling up. In reality, neither is true. What the Jack Daniels is doing is falling towards the earth, because the earth, as all mass does, exerts a force called gravity that attracts other forms of mass.
So when you say, who said that things fall down, you are really asking, why are things attracted to each other? Unfortunately, I can not answer that question with the time I have before I become bored with this, so i will give you a link or two:
http://www.pa.msu.edu/~sciencet/ask_st/092497.html - What Makes Gravity (short, to the point)
http://www.howstuffworks.com/question232.htm - How does gravity work? *Recommended
That is how Gravity works. Who made gravity work that way, well, it could have been God. or maybe, it could just be the way it is. In rational terms (and you are rational, right?) both arguments hold equal weight.
Well, it is an observable (to a degree) and testable law of the universe, seems to be fairly obvious and a part of common sense, and can be explained here:
http://id.mind.net/~zona/mstm/physics/mechanics/forces/newton/newtonLaw1.html - basic explanation
As to who made the universe this way, it could have been God, or it could have been time-travelling Brazilian super-babies. Both arguments hold equal weight.
Actually, this would be an argument for the disproval of God, more than anything. I mean, if God created us in His image, why are so many of us (especially, as it seems, members of the faithful) ugly as the proverbial canine’s behind? As was, so it apparently turns out, Jesus?
But really, Just go to www.talkorigins.org or any other related site to get a nice explanation of how we are, how we came to be, etc.
So in answer to your question, God could have set everyting in motion with the form that we have now in mind, or it could be entirely by chance that we look the way we do. Or, it could be that the way we are is the best that we can be (in the given time we have had to evolve) to survive in our environment. Fish are pretty good at being fish, Lemurs are very good at being Lemurs, and Humans are very good at being humans. What did you expect evolution to give us, wheels?
I don’t have any idea what this question is asking. I would like an elaboration, and if any dopers can understand it, they are welcome to reply.
*Although as a side note, so what? Just because something is very very very very very unlikely, that does not mean it is impossible. Don’t make that rounding error.
Well, there is the Big Bang theory. Where the form of mass the size of roughly two american garages that blew up to make the Big Bang came from is moot. Again, I am not too familiar with this subject, so all I can do is give this link for a Big Bang explanation.
http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm
Not really. Refer to above link, and another for good measure:
http://casswww.ucsd.edu/public/tutorial/BB.html - warning: very sciency
Not as simplistic as you state. Refer to www.talkorigins.org again for details on evolution.
Well, assuming that someone to be God, I would agree with you. However, science, evolution, all of that deals with how, not if. Science can neither prove nor disprve God, and is not meant to.
For example, I say that God created the universe. i don’t know how, so I look at the world around me for answers. And evolution, the big bang, this is what the world tells me. So either God created the world this way, or God does not exist. As I believe in God I have no choice but to accept the former.
As noted by Tracer, the watchmaker parable has been covered. Thanks Tracer.
Addressed above. And as a side note, to say “Science would have me believe” is wrong. Science supplies evidence for its theories, and seeks to prove, verify, and refine them. Rather, it is religion that would have you believe that some magical sky-pixie is floating around up there, collecting the souls of the dead and forcing those damned to spend eternity talking to John Edwards.
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I just don’t buy it. The parts of the watch didn’t come together over millions of years to form a watch. The watch maker made the watch.
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Again, thanks to Tracer for covering this.
That is the big equalizer. Religion has made my life better also, immeasurably. And as you say, religion can be a blessing, and a curse. Don’t let it become a curse for you and your quest for truth.
I’ll buy this. Why not?
Well, I suppose that in some sense I am ‘afraid’ of death, but in everyday life that is something I have bypassed. My time to join God will come, and in the meantime I am going to make the most of my life. There is an old saying in Mexico - si me toca me toca, “What happens to me will happen, regardless.” While you shouldn’t be so careless with your life, you need to accept that Death is also part of Life, and it will come for all.
Agreed.
Yes it does. But it does not help in explaining the world. We cannot say to ourselves, God did it. We have to continually look to explain whatever we can explain. If something becomes too complex, you can’t just give up, with a “God did it,” and keep your intellectual integrity. Saying that God did it and leaving no other explanation is lazy and intellectually dishonest. Many people, including myself, accept that God created the universe, and us. And we use science to explain how this happened. Not to say that God did not do it.
Science and faith are not mutually exclusive. Those who say they are are doomed to a life of ignorance and prejudice.
And, recalling subjectivity, everyone always chooses good.
What is this supposed to mean? What is science suppose to be “better at”? Science is:" A set of methods to designed and interpret observed or inferred phenomena, past, or present, and aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation."
(This definition comes from Shermer…I think, either that or talkorigins, I don’t remember)
Nature has structure? Explain please. No one “designed” the human body, although I do think Microsoft is looking into it in order to compete…
The “watch-maker” argument…Oh boy… This seems to be an ID statement. If you have read, and believed Behe, please read this:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html
I’m glad religion has made your life better, but keep in mind this isn’t the case for everyone.
I also disagree with your last three statements: They aren’t inclusive to everyone, maybe a majority of the population, but certainly not everyone.
Sometimes, I’m afraid of death. Most of the time, however, I’m not. I’m usually only afraid of dying when the danger of dying is imanent, when that survival instinct kicks in for the moment. But as a major driving force in how I live my life normally, it’s really not a pressing concern on my mind. I generally don’t make decisions that could increase my chances of death needlessly, but as a fact of life, I know that I’ll die someday, and that fact doesn’t really scare me deep down. You can believe what you will, but after burying a lot of loved ones I always respected as braver and more enlightened than myself, being with them as they die, your feelings and attitudes change.
points taken, so where does everyone else stand when it comes to religion?
And the corollary, there are faithless people who fit either of these categories nicely. Faith, religion and belief in a god (or the lack of these) have not a damned thing to do with morality. Morality is a human construct and acting morally is a human choice.
Useless abstraction. Unless one is looking for a justification to act as one would anyway—be it good or bad.
Morality (a good one or a bad one) can be derived from one’s religious beliefs – but the first great lesson I learned here is that one is individually responsible for one’s moral choices, and that they are not necessarily based on ukases from on high. Some of the most moral people I know through this board are atheists.
The biggest complaint most non-believers have against Christianity is that in it salvation is not based on moral judgment. While this is true, it is better expressed as, “You cannot yourself make adequate moral judgments to do the right things at all times and in all circumstances. If, however, you take Jesus as Lord of your life, He will (to the extent you permit it) allow His Holy Spirit to permeate your existence, and to guide you into the behavior He commands, which involves moral treatment based on love for all your fellow men.” (And, of course, too many Christians instead subvert it into a hidebound following of allegedly divine rules, with the net effect of hating and marginalizing their “different” neighbor instead of loving him.)