You’re not addressing that I pointed out how this supposition contradicts your statement: “something is needed to begin something”. If an intelligent being can always exist, then your claim that simpler stuff can’t always exist makes no sense. You can’t just give God a free pass; you have to explain why He’s an exception to your rule.
No, you didn’t; you just claimed it was true. Even though it contradicts your reasoning that something in the universe can’t come from nothing or always exist.
We’re left with lots of questions. Claiming not having answers means “God did it” explains nothing and leaves us with the questions:
How do you know this?
How did an all intelligent being get here and if He always existed how is that possible?
How did God make spacetime?
You’re under the erroneous assumption that atheists have to explain things there may be no scientific answers for yet and that “God did it” is any kind of explanation at all.
I can accept this if we look at the practices, myths, and rituals separately rather than lump it all together and want to throw out anything that even hints at God belief.
In another thread I suggested that the more rational approach, {mature works well too} is for believers to hold their beliefs provisionally. Let’s be aware of the important difference between beliefs and facts. When believers hold on to hard to certain traditional beliefs insisting they must be fact and are immune from reexamination they limit their own growth and the growth of those they influence.
The thing about quantum mechanics, virtual particles as such is that at the most fundamental level something always exists or it’s potential to exist. QM states there is always potentially something, a virtual particle can spring into existence from nothing as can in theory our universe. The universe does not need a creator because it is impossible for “nothing” to exist.
That was an example cite. There are several different studies, including those that are specific to (for instance) the US. The result is consistent from everything I’ve seen.
Certainly. But at the same time, that doesn’t seem to mean much since most people appear to be trained to be religious from their infancy. But people who are more intelligent appear to be more resistant to this training. Those who have more schooling, similarly, appear to be more resistant to this training. That’s the data as it is, and I said nothing more than that. So what phrasing you might have read into it I don’t know. I can go search up a list of separate studies.
Well like I said in the OP, it’s pretty easy to show that people will behave irrationally when they have had odd training since their infancy. I’d be fully willing to bet that a child raised in a majority racist society by racist parents will be racist about 99% of the time, with probably a greater likelihood of not being a racist the more intelligent they are.
No, it can’t. Virtual particles do not literally come into being out of nothing. Rather, they energy locked up in the quantum vacuum fluctuates spontaneously such that bits of this energy are converted into evanescent particles. That’s not the same as coming from nothing.
Again, physicists Barrow and Tipler emphasized this at considerable length in The Cosmological Anthropic Principle. This is a book in which they attempted to explain away the appearance of cosmic design, so if anything, they would have had a vested interest in asserting that something could come from nothingness. Instead, they emphasized that this was a completely inaccurate interpretation of quantum mechanics and the so-called “quantum vacuum.”
No. Virtual particles do not come into existence from nothingness, and so it’s fallacious to assert that this somehow implies that the entire universe could do the same.
:rolleyes: Oh, please. Does saying the “sky is blue” require a link to a photo of a blue sky ? When I say that there is no evidence for religion, what am I supposed to do, post a link labeled “Evidence of religion” that doesn’t lead anywhere ? When I talk about the WELL KNOWN evils committed in the name of religion, am I supposed to post a link to some random selection when people ALREADY KNOW about those evils ? Demanding evidence and pointing out well known facts isn’t “dogmatism”.
I’m not indulging in “dogma”; I’m pointing out the obvious. You disagree ? Show me some evidence for God. Not empty assertions, but actual evidence. You are like someone claiming that there are aliens at Area 51 who responds to demands for evidence with accusations of “dogmatism” aimed at the demanders of evidence.
No the “rational and mature” approach is to simply throw out such unsupported, evidence free, physics defying beliefs. There’s no rational reason to think that religious beliefs are any more real than any other superstition.
Either you’re arguing that God has existed for an infinite amount of time, which is gibbering nonsense on the order of “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” - or you are claiming that the god-thing is the uncaused cause, the prime mover, the uncreated object.
If you are claiming the latter, you need to convince us what’s different about God from, say, a pocketwatch, to make him more believable as an uncaused cause. (Your approach so far, ‘argument by repeatition’, is unlikely to be convincing to this crowd.)
Science makes the argument by stating that the universe was very simple when it first came into being, and gradually developed complexity afterward. This seems more plausible than positing that the very complex thing called God just popped into existence, fully created.
It’s kind of the difference in plausibility between an exploding paint can making a random splatter, and an exploding paint can making a perfectly halftoned duplication of the Mona Lisa.
in order to validate religion and understand where the universe came from i proposed that something cannot come from nothing and i haven’t read any posts that counter this. the question then became what was the something, and i offered God, which was not surprisenly rejected. in one reply i wrote somethings have a wide range of abilities, some simple, others not so (i had animate somethings in mind, i apologize this wasn’t specified), when this is considered it is reasonable that to a lesser something a greater something’s abilites may seem magical. this is certainly the case when an advanced civilization encounters one less so, (this seems akin to replies i’ve read regarding God’s nature and God’s not being possible). a new proposel, is that inanimate somethings cannot create animate somethings, life does not come from lifeless. animate somethings however can create both; i am a father and i enjoy a cup of coffee each morning.
taking all this together i propose;
the universe came from something: something cannot come from nothing
as the universe contains both inanimate and animate somethings, the universe came from an animate something: inanimate somethings cannot create animate somethings
the lesser somethings in the universe do not fully understand the greater something which created the universe: God
i expect charges of holes in my reasoning, contradiction, not using the tools of logic correctly, etc, but i do not see how any of the tenets cannot stand on their own, and taken together they lead to a reasonable conclusion
You’ve not explained why the Universe can’t have always existed, just the same as the deity you propose. You’ve also not explained why not that we’re all a bump on a flying turnip in another dimension or some other one of the inifinite number of possible explanations for the universe once you move beyond what we can show can and has existed: i.e. the known universe.
Not “surprisenly” at all, since you violated your own conditions.
That’s a proposal, now all you have to do is prove it.
And animate things count as “somethings”. How did that animate thing get there if you’ve already concluded that something can not come from nothing?
See what you just did there? You contradicted yourself. If the universe must come from something, then that something must then also come from something, and so on.
You still haven’t proved that.
And you don’t understand what you’ve been told over and over again. God doesn’t get a free pass from being an exception to your rule until you give a plausible reason why He should.
Hey! That’s a lame attempt at avoiding the issue by misdirection. This is not what I was talking about and you know it. Your opinions about religion and the conclusions you draw from the available relevant facts are not obvious or true. The results are the sweeping often ludicrous generalizations we’ve come io know and barely tolerate. It’s the flip side of the fundie coin. You constantly claiming how obvious they are so there’s no need for evidence is your personal version of “the bible says it so it must be true, no evidence required”
As I said; dogma. If you don’t like the definition please forward all future complaints to Webster.
I will give your opinion on what is rational and mature all the serious consideration it deserves.
Then get to it already. Name a specific belief that Der Trehs has. If it’s shown that he has claimed having that belief and he can’t back up his rationale for it with evidence, your point stands.
Actually I can’t be sure because you don’t seem interested in actually stating a position. You just like tossing out excuses for religion.
Such as ? Religion being based on faith ? Religion nearly always being wrong ? Religion having no evidence for it ? Religion having a long history of atrocities and stupidities committed in it’s name ? Which of those isn’t both well known and obvious ?
First of all I DO give evidence, now and then. I just don’t bother with every single post. Just like everyone. And, since it’s the believers claiming something exists, it’s their job to come up with some evidence for their fantasies being true, not mine to show them wrong. Demanding evidence isn’t the same as claiming something impossible while lacking evidence.
No, you won’t. My position, that *‘the “rational and mature” approach is to simply throw out such unsupported, evidence free, physics defying beliefs’ *is exactly the position that most people, including probably you use for nearly everything in their life. Except, in the case of believers, religion. You will continue to hold religion to a special, much, much, much lower standard because without that lower standard you’d have no choice but to admit just how silly and baseless it is.
I haven’t taken a personal poll, but I must be one of the 1% who embraced, not a religion, but GOD and Christ because Both made themselves known to me. My parents and siblings are (or were) atheist.
To say that people adopt the religion of their parents is in contrast with recent polls on the subject. Here’s one comprehensive study conducted by Barna.
You are the one making the claim, therefore you are the one who has the burden of providing evidence. Not me.
And whatever point you are trying to make, it’s not a good analogy for religion. Religion regularly makes extravagant claims that violate physical law, about things for which there is no evidence they exist. Tapping someone on the shoulder isn’t an equivalent claim, because it’s possible. Being possible puts it in a different category than the vast majority of religious claims, as does being about things that are known to exist.