Do you believe in God?

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I'm belittling an idea. And it doesn't bother me at all if someone is offended when I belittle their precious idea. If they can be an intellectual and separate the idea from their own ego, we will get along just fine. Let me be clear, if people get offended... I. Don't. Care.


I'm not the one saying there's a God.


Of course, but in this case it isn't true that I don't have the foggiest idea.



Yes, because I think that those consequences overwhelm any potential benefits.


I don't feel that religion is necessary to help people. Sadly, even the moderates of religion give cover to the institution itself, and seem to make it palatable for others. I certainly don't have a problem with people doing good, but it's often poisoned by religion. Catholic hospitals, for instance, have gained a monopoly in many places as sources of health care. Unfortunately, they can't help but inject their religion into their service, saying they have a right to refuse certain kinds of life saving care, and to deny their (female) employees health care.


I never said religion was all bad, or has only bad consequences, that's a straw man argument. Only that I feel the bad outweighs the good, and they do nothing that couldn't also be done in a secular way.


It's not a hole in my argument. Even Hitler did good things. I'm sure he was nice to his family and pets.


There can be two sides to whether religion is an ultimate benefit to society. I will grant you that.

There are two sides (or more) to whether God exists. On this subject I don't think the sides are equal. I maintain the God side is full of faulty reasoning and logical fallacies. And it represents an especially deplorable and dangerous idea, that it's good to believe in things without reliable evidence. Furthermore, religion seeks to undermine our own reasoning abilities by popularizing several unreliable forms of evidence as if they were valid. For instance, vague prophecies claiming to be fulfilled in the same book in which they were mentioned (with no other evidence), personal anecdotes, and the confirmation bias often given as proof that prayer works. And they defend their side in part by putting up a good show of being offended when their beliefs are questioned. Did they care if I was offended when I was coerced to say "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? No, they don't care at all in condemning me to eternal torture!


It's intellectually dishonest to suggest that there are always two equally valid sides to every argument. Yes, it's possible to hold an ideology that says religious people should be banished or worse from society. But it's not as much of a danger because there is no book telling people that. No book that tradition has deemed a good book to live your life by. Atheism is more often found in combination with humanism and democratic values. But religion is an especially insidious ideology due to it's holy books, and the esteem with which those books are held, and the abhorrent, immoral things those books tell people to do and believe. You may say some people are good in spite of those books, and I say they are good in direct proportion to their lack of adherence to them.


Thank you for pointing out one of the great dangers of religion. It can be used by unscrupulous people to justify all sorts of bad behaviors. Why? Because holy books are often full of bad behaviors! For instance, the Bible approves of slavery, and was used to justify slavery for centuries. The fact that other religious people also used it to fight slavery doesn't cancel that out.



Doesn't make them equally justified. And I think I do change minds. Maybe not immediately, but maybe people will think about their own reasons for believing.


A premise asserted without evidence can be denied without evidence.


Again, I don't give a s**t how it's perceived. They could very well be idiots. But now we are actually getting to something important. Personal experiences. Why are they proof? Are our brains always reliable? Are perceptions always reality? Can the mind by tricked? Is there such a thing as mass psychosis? Optical illusions? Do our beliefs affect what we see? Science reveals that trusting the mind to perceive truth is misguided and often in error. So, you who demand proof, why is personal experience proof of anything?

So it looks like you should stop trusting your mind to believe that God doesn't exist? Since science shows us the perceptions of our minds are often in error. You're funny.

I cannot say I agree with that notion. If anything the preponderance of evidence favors God, unless you wish to invoke the multiverse theory. If you were to base the constants of the universe and balance them in probability,
the chances of the universe appearing on its own is essentially 1/10^528 (the answer is obv. incorrect did it quickly on my pocket calculator.) At this point, since the multiverse cannot be proved or observed in a manner that can be falsified, Occam's Razor favors the idea of God.

No, when t=0.

What is inaccurate?

Nothing in that analysis discards the notion of God's existence. If we can observe even ONE supernatural event, the evidence points to such a conclusion.

I was responding to edenthiel's seeming caricature of your argument.

It was not a caricature. I was examining when natural and supernatural events have happened in relation to the existence of our Universe. The consistencies (we call them laws) of our Universe enforce that anything that happens is natural; for something supernatural to occur it must be outside our Universe. The only way we can conceive of that is by going back in time to the point before those consistencies existed. Therefore, for something 'supernatural' to be, it had to be before our Universe attained its current structure. It is also conceivable that it could be outside our Universe but that is equally unsatisfying as it takes us back to the God that cannot in any way intersect with or be a part of our lives.

In that case, I agree with you, except that I see no reason to assume the super-natural could not intercede the natural.

How do we know that the "consistencies" have always been the same? There are some secular non-Christian scientists who are finding evidence of the universe expanding, and the speed of light slowing down proportionally. If we take that into account, it can drastically change the current "accepted" model of our universe.

You are very correct in pointing out the provisional nature of explanation in science. The singularity that marks the beginning of the universe is just that type of point. It is that point before which we cannot gain say, becuase our laws of nature as we currently experience them "condensed" out of the pure energy (although even energy is a poor term at this stage) after this singularity ballooned into a space-time-energy manifold. But I do recognize that the laws of nature could themselves evolve. For example, the increasing rate of expansion is a mystery. Ive often wondered about whther the "physics" which would allow slef replicating molecules to form could have occurred somewhere around the time of the big bang and the seeding of life around the universe could be a panspermia... etc. I am not dead set in my theoriees about the nature of the universe... it is fun to speculate. However, I love to do so with the idea that there is a Mind behind it all... and that matter/energy is derived from mind and not the other way around. Since God is speculated to be the creater and upholder of the entire universe, it is not a far stretch to suppose that he could specially intervene in the process to influence the system by injecting power in... and thereby altering or suspending the laws of physics. Indeed it is the regularities in nature that allow us to recognize when a miracle occurs (which is why Hume was wrong.)

My atheism is not based on a perception.

My atheism is based upon a lack of faith in the existence of a Supreme Being or beings, goblins, ghosts, spirits, etc.

My agnosticism is based upon a "who knows?" orientation, wherein I don't preclude ANYTHING.

The physical constants aren't properties of the universe, they are properties of the calculations of physicists. Not quite the same thing. Theists often use nonsense probabilities to lend pseudoscientific support their claims. Even if you were able to show that the universe appeared "on it's own" (whatever that means), you are still far from showing that God was the cause. And far from explaining why God can be self caused but the universe can't be (special pleading fallacy).

Not only is your atheism based on YOUR perception, but it is also YOUR choice to believe it.

And you are not an atheist, but in actuality an "anti-theist". You can not tolerate other people having a God centric worldview so you find justifications to try to eradicate their belief systems as well.

Atheists can generally live at peace with people who are religious.

I think some people do not understand that God is a word that represents a whole slew of knowledge constructs. God is a theory. As I have mentioned previously, this is part of the reason it is so difficult to talk about this.... people's definitions do not align because of the differing systems of knowledge they start out from. I like the theory of God.

When people claim that their atheism is simply a lack of belief in God, I remind them that agnosticism is actually what they mean, because if they are actually atheist they are positing the claim that there is no God, which is a claim to not only know some internal implicit inconsistencies/contradictions within the concept of God, which they need to make explicit.... but also a claim to know that it is not even possible that God could exist..... but we know from Kant as well as Godel that this sort of knowledge is impossible. So the atheist, if he is to give himself that identity, shoulders a very heavy claim with an enormous burden of proof. However, many people do adopt that position and can still get along with the theist.

I feel like people who say we cannot know anything about God are simply ignoring the actual content all of the worlds religions and the entire enterprise of metaphysics and epistemology and science... they do not engage with the source material, because they believe it all to be silly and so their own understanding of theology and philosophy is superficial. This is also why they have a hard time giving positive arguments against the existence of God... they cant refer to the esoteric concepts within each system of belief. I am not saying every atheist is as shallow as this... it is simply a fact that there are plenty of shallow theists and atheists alike... who have not examined their beliefs or thought critically about these issues.... all too often people just "echo chamber" what others say, and therefore influence each other in feed-back loop of misinformation and ignorance.... from both sides...

There is a new movement called "new atheism," which is stronger than the traditional atheism. This new atheism is the "anti-theism movement." These people would contend that not only is God not real, it is an irrational concept that is poisonous to humanism, and therefore should be eliminated from the earth. In other words, not only is there not God, but there should not be even the idea of God... This is one of the only major religion that I am personally intolerant of-- New Atheism/Anti-theism.... its such a bitter, sad, spiteful, toxic, shallow... and (if you actually think it through) unlivable ideology.... I think they need a good dose of existentialism conjoined with a thorough reading of Nietzsche, followed by the simple offer of Pascal's Wager. The Ravi Zacharias video, "Why I am not an Atheist" that I posted earlier in this thread goes into this very well.