Well, you’d be wrong.No one has ever found evidence for any gods, or even evidence that one is possible. That means believing in a god is irrational.
History and the news support my view of the destructiveness of religion. Atheism isn’t destructive; being anothing more than an absence of belief, it isn’t much of a motivator for destruction. And no, communism doesn’t count; as I and others have said, communism is effectively just a non-theistic religion trying to destroy it’s rivals; they would have behaved no better if they were theists, and probably worse. They would have been more likely to start a nuclear war, for example.
Religion is a major motive for bad behavior as well; look at all the religious conflicts where nobody gains anything. That’s not religion being used as an excuse; that’s religion being bad on it’s own.
Many theories postulate an exterior metauniverse from which ours has come; that one may well be of infinite age. Before you say it no, that’s not the same as postulating a god; we know universes exist; we have no such evidence for gods. Second, there is no point in thinking bout miracles; the term itself is pretty much opposed to thinking. That, after all is what belief in a creator god is all about; you can turn off your mind and say “God did it !”. It answers nothing, and is simply meant to eliminate all tought, speculation and debate.
Getting back to the OP, that’s another reason many are religious. It lets them avoid unpleasant or difficult thoughts, and helps them avoid feeling uncertain about anything. Evolution being the classic example.
Belief in God is a matter of faith, rather than science, by definition. People who believe in God (in my experience) do not do a scientific analysis and after years of study reach the conclusion that there must be a God. People believe there is a God because they just feel it, or they were raised to believe. (Other posters have alluded to phsyiological/psychological reasons why people may believe, although these explanations seem to deny the possibility that they believe it because it’s true.) However, some of the faithful try to rationalize their belief by retrofitting experience back into their belief (e.g., intelligent design) so it sounds like scientific evidence.
Demanding scientific evidence for the lack of God is sort of a contradiction since it is simply not a matter of science at all. I could claim I have a friend who is an invisible rabbit named Harvey and you would have a hard time scientifically disproving it. Scientific theories are bolstered by determining what the theory predicts under certain conditions, then creating those conditions to see if the theory was correct. You can’t really do that to test the exsistence of God.
I have always been stumped by the perception of many faithful that God and science are incompatible. You can, as a poster above mentioned, believe in God and the Big Bang at the same time. The faithful can believe devoutly and still accept all scientic theory on the basis that God created science and put its principles into play. That’s why I don’t get all the attacks on evolution–well, if you just assume that God created recombinant DNA and genetics, what’s the problem?
The OP asked why people still believe in God, and I am really noticing that word “still,” Is there some reason that people in 2005 should believe in God less than at any time in the past? If science and God can be compatible, then certainly the advancement of science is not discouragement for belief in God. So what is the OP getting at?
Deep thought on these subjects would include learning about the vastness of the universe, the likelihood there are extra dimensions we can’t even perceive, the strangeness of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, and the different theories about what isn’t included in our universe. Other study should include the biology of consciousness and how little we know.
It is just basically educating yourself very well on the parts of science that we don’t understand and yet play the most key roles about our existence, destination, and the origin of the universe.
I am perhaps the world’s only militant, evangelical agnostic. I like to point out that the evidence suggests that the universe is a hell of a lot more strange than people tend to realize. I don’t believe in one of the common Gods but I do know the answer, whatever it is, will be bizarre to our little human minds. If you open up the possibility that a God could take many forms, then there is no reason for me to rule out that we aren’t part of some conscious whole or something like that.
So your belief in God is contingent on the empirical evidence supporting the big bang? If progress in physics led us to believe that the universe has always existed, you would cease to be a theist?
I disagree with this. I’m not arguing that bad things have not occured in the name of religion, but I do not believe it is fair to pit the religion due to individuals (or groups) manipulating the religion for their own gains and/or bias. While there may be aspects of religions that call for hatred, there are those within the religion that believe these to be perversions of the true religion. An example I can think of off the top of my head is Reform Judaism; a Rabbi I met in Seattle once told me that the true message of God is in the positive aspects of the Torah and that the negative parts were added by man.
Personally, I don’t think religion is bad. Fundamentalism is the problem and it comes in many different shades that are not limited to religion alone.
As for why people still believe in God, I think there are several different reasons; tradition, community, the positive effect their belief in God has had on their life, they see no reason not to believe, they had an experience that they believe proves Gods existence*, the believe science proves Gods existence (and theories that those use to disprove God are wrong**), Occum’s Razor could be wrong, it gives them hope, they fear an eternity in hell and believing doesn’t hurt anything, they attribute morals/ethics to God and believe that if God did not exist we would be a society that lacked morals and ethics, they feel better believing we’re here for a purpose rather than by chance (that we’re important), or in general it makes them feel better… that’s all I can think of now.
My husband had a professor in Dallas who was a Catholic Cistercian that claimed physics is a description of what happens rather than an explanation of why things happens, because science does not cover why.
** I had a friend at A&M that had a Masters in Physics and was working towards a PhD in Geophysics to disprove theories that he believed were scientically flawed because people claimed they disproved God.
Okay then - which god do you believe in, and is there any evidence that this god had anything to do with creation.
Some good evidence would be getting the story right, which no gods from any religion I know of did.
About 100 years ago an American conducted an experiment to determine the weight of the human soul.
He did this as follows;
He had 6 terminally ill patients (tubercolosis) in beds which were also weighing devices and at the exact moment of each of the demise of a patient he noticed that their weight decreased by approx 21 grammes.
He repeated the experiment using dogs as the subjects but as they passed on their weight remained the same.
From this he concluded that while humans have a soul animals do not.
Personally I don’t subscribe to this, I think it’s a load of hogwash
The universe has always existed. It was never nothing. The Big Bang did not so much “happen” as exists somewhere in the universe (indeed, it is the universe - we live in the Big Bang).
What use is an initiating creator for something that was never initiated or created, but was always there?
See the USSR under Stalin or modern day China trying to get rid of Faug Gong (I opened a thread on this about 1 week ago - don’t have time to search)
It certainally does - this is the result of a nation not under God, they nation becomes God - it is the natural tendance IMHO. Puting a nation under God means that the nation is NOT the ulitmate authority and there is a power far greater then that.
Depending on how you define ‘God’ yes theyre is plenty of evidence, but that is more correctly called intelligent design.
I.D. does not mean there is a God, just a designer, who might be God, might be ‘evil’ might be long dead, might be a kid in some preschool class in the interuniversal school and we are just a see monkey poject.
Life itself it all the proof on should require for I.D., the beleive that a lightning bolt just combined all things needed for a working and reproducing cell is irrational.
I would think the “still” part comes from belief being unnecessary. Sure, back when most religions were created or imagined, we needed some explanation of what made lightning or where tornados came from.
God certainly isn’t needed anymore to explain these things, we can make some of them on demand.
As I was writing this it struck me that it must have seemed quite reasonable a few thousand years ago to assume someone was causing all those natural phenomena. What other choice did they have?
I was raised Roman Catholic, but became an atheist well before I completed twelve years of Catholic education. At the age of 45, I became a believer after hearing the personal testimony of a Christian acquaintance. I believe in God because what I have read in scripture, the writings of Christian apologists, the testimony of Christians and my personal experiences have convinced me that God exists.
Because we have no reason to believe there is one. There’s not one shred of evidence that even suggests there MIGHT be one. The world can be an ugly place and to suggest there’s a being that even CARES…let alone CONTROLS anything is preposterous.
Anything’s possible, but to actually believe there is one as opposed to agreeing the possibility exists are two different things.
