And then there are the many atheists who weren’t brought up in a religion and thus aren’t culturally inclined to believe in gods. I understand why on an American board, the default assumption is that an atheist must be an apostate and have strong feelings or even fervor about their atheism. For a counterexample, the majority of German people from the former GDR weren’t raised in a religion and 70% of East German people today are irreligious. They just weren’t fed the stories, myths and ceremonies, religion was never a part of their lives. They are mostly just normal people that happen to have no religion, without most people thinking much or having big philosophical thoughts about it. The same most probably applies to the Czech Republic too.
As part of her Fulbright one of my daughters taught in a high school in Southern Germany. While hardly anyone seemed to believe, they all went to religious instruction in schools. She liked it since they got both the Catholic and Protestant holidays off.
She married a German guy, and just before the wedding his stepfather was very concerned that we, being from America, had to be religious fanatics. My daughter laughed her head off.
I’m sure it does, sometime, but I’ve never heard anyone say it. With the possible exception of theists who claim to have been atheists, but who can never give a good reason for their lack of belief. Not that this is required, but most of the time the equate atheism with not going to church.
Also most of the time, when pressed, they were ‘’‘atheist’’’ somewhere between the ages of 12 and 17.
Actually, theistic people don’t do that. Governmental people do that. Keep in mind that, among the other things that visionary prophet and seer type people tend to shoot their mouths off about, there’s the “how to do society properly” stuff that government people tend to regard as their area of operations. Visionary folks of the non-institutional-religion variety would crop up from time to time and point fingers at the leaders of the tribe and it wasn’t a politely pointed finger a good portion of the time. Or they’d bid the people to stop doing things that the governmental leader liked them doing. Or bid them start doing something the governmental leader didn’t want them doing. And these folks were often charismatic, intense, convinced by the clarity of their vision that they had some right-on important shit to tell everyone about. And to some extent people listened and got what it was these intense visionary folks were onto — at least enough to give them a lot of credibility with the listeners, who would then follow them around and listen to everything they said and become, well, you know, followers.
Governmental leader types figured out that if you have a State Religion, it’s like a vaccine against those folks. “We already GOT OURS, so shut the fuck up. Our savior was Jeremy the Ptoth, holy be his name, and all that God wanted us to hear, Jeremy done told us and it’s writ down right here on these cuneiform tablets. And if you try to add to it or dissent with it, that makes you EEEEVIL”. The added benefit of being able to motivate the common people to do what you want with religious ferfor is a nice bonus but the original motivation was to stop upstart prophet types from having a ready available audience.
Oddly, the first time through I read that as “y’know, rolled in it.” I think either phrase would work.
The reason is because there is no other explanation for the origin of the universe and life.
It’s very reasonable … and I’m saying that as an atheist.
Welcome to the Dope.
There are plenty of explanations for the universe and life. We don’t know which is true, but we’re closer when it comes to life. And God is not much of an explanation. Grad students in another dimension in a universe creation lab is more reasonable.
Why more reasonable? We’ve see plenty of grad students but no gods.
Do you mean START or ORIGIN?
The universe started with the Big Bang but is that an explanation of creation of matter or waves?
Abiogenesis explains how life begins…but not the origin of the materials.
God is not much of an explanation?
It’s the ONLY one at present outside of ‘the universe always existed…it was never created’.
“ Grad students in another dimension in a universe creation lab is more reasonable.”
… how did they come to be? …
“We’ve see plenty of grad students but no gods.”
Ok, well that would … reasonably… mean god is not physical.
I think it’s reasonable that any reasonable explanation beside ‘divine magic’ would cause a supernatural explanation to be voidable … so why aren’t there thousands of YouTube videos by antitheists detailing those explanations instead of ridiculing belief?
(Because there are no explanations besides god except for ‘everything always existed’ which is reasonable for most people to not accept.)
That’s a classic argument from ignorance fallacy.
Just because we don’t know the answer to something, it does not therefore follow that the only other explanation is a god.
Man, you’re a terrible atheist. 
If you are invoking the God of the Gaps, can you at least enlighten us as to which god it is that squeezes into those ever tightening gaps in our knowledge of the universe?
These ‘cosmic grad students’ need not be all-powerful, nor omni-present, nor omni-benevolent. Indeed, the creator(s) of our universe could be as deeply flawed, and morally ambiguous, as anyone else. Ancient belief systems often took this possibility into consideration; the gods of the ancient Greeks and Romans were a reprehensible lot.
The fact that many modern people believe that God is benevolent is little more than wishful thinking.
But how does it answer anything? Because we can of course ask Where did god come from?
And the typical retort: “God has always existed” has at least these two responses:
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Why don’t we just say the cosmos has always existed, then? It seems a simpler model.
Note that the cosmos is not the same thing as the universe; the cosmos includes things like the multiverse, so is not subject to things like entropy. -
Actually, just saying that something has been around forever doesn’t really answer anything either, people just think it does. Just saying that something was uncaused doesn’t explain why it exists and why it has the properties it has, so, from a philosophical point of view, doesn’t do much to address the ontological problem.
Tautologically.
If you ask a scientist how the universe began, they will give you a long detailed explanation, depending on how much time and patience you have, this could go on for a long, long, long time, and in the end, admit that there are some parts that we just don’t know.
For people who want answers this isn’t good enough. “God did it!” is a simple and unambiguous answer, and any further questions are met with words like “ineffable”.
If you want an easy to understand explanation of how we got here, then religion is the way to go. Actually understanding how we got here is hard and may leave one unsatisfied as to the loose ends that still exist in our knowledge.
Yeah, this deist god is only trotted out during these debates. The deist god is fine and all, but doesn’t mean anything for today’s society.
- Something created the universe
- That something is god
- Therefore, I don’t have to bake this cake for that gay couple.
Thinking about this more, the whole old and huge universe is an argument against any sort of personal, interventionist god.
The sequence is 13.5 billion years ago, God created this giant cosmos, billions and billions of light years wide, with billions and billions of stars (hi, Carl!). Then, He waited 8 billion years or so and directed the Earth to be formed.
Then, He waited another 5 billion years and directed evolution so that dinosaurs dominated and mammals were hiding in the shadows. Oh crap! That went wrong, better send an asteroid!
Then, about 100k to 200k years ago, He directed evolution to make the first modern humans, after trying out lots of other hominids. Then, he waited another 95k-195k years so that a group of humans could cobble together creations myths and create Judaism. Then, he waited another 3,000 years to send his Son. Then, another 1,000 years or so to send along Mohammed, and then another 800 years to inspire Joseph Smith.
It makes total sense! This is obviously the way that an omnipotent being would go about this.
Evolution is the biggest thing that keeps me believing in something without having any kind of actual concept. DNA seems to have the potential to have created all past and present lifeforms as well as unimaginable life forms that may appear in the future. I can’t help but believe life only exists here because it exists somewhere else. Another thing I find interesting is that my private thoughts seem to be directed at something besides myself. This is something that seems totally out of my control. I tend to run everything past this invisible, silent, unreacting something. When I feel guilt I find myself apologizing. It is very easy for me to see why people believe in God and form religions.
Ah, now I’ve got the theme song of The Big Bang Theory stuck in my head.
You have to keep in mind that in Universe Sim XT, you do have a time acceleration option.
I’m not a huge simulated universe advocate, but I hold it as significantly higher chance than divine supernatural causes. And if the universe is a sim, then god isn’t the creator, he didn’t build the hardware or write the software for the sim, he just downloaded it off Steam and is running it in the background. He didn’t make the rules of the universe, and is almost as beholden to them as we are.
@HoneyBadgerDC, I don’t really follow what you’re saying. You don’t need DNA for evolution – any time you have replication and mutation, with competition, you’ll have evolution. I think evolution is a lot more intuitive than quantum physics or general relativity, where you think you have some intuition, but what you really have are formulas describing the weird ways that the world works.