god created the universe and let it evolve without any furth

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Of course it is. The spirit of exploration is one of man's greatest assets.

untrue. You will never know everything. So you can know that.

How do you know that?

limitations to human knowledge.

That's a real snappy reply that contains no real substantial information at all. What it means is that you think so and I doubt you. Really efficient scientific research is less than a couple of hundred years old and we have uncovered quite a lot in that extremely short time. Let's have this discussion again in a thousand years and we'll see if your supposition has any validity.

Do you mean to say there are no limitations to human knowledge? Human knowledge does but expand and keep expanding, that is much is clear.

Potentially, there are no limitations to what we can know & learn. But human nature itself prevents any ascension to godhood. Knowledge grows and understanding increases geometrically, sure, but human nature does not change. Sloth, gluttony, envy, pride, lust, pride, wrath. Have any of these imperfections been improved by intellectual prowess alone? No, not in all of recorded history.

I realize Christians are disturbed by greed and laziness much more than they are by stupidity since there is no mention of intelligence in the bible as a praiseworthy characteristic but greed in some eyes merely is judicious acquisition in others and hell, I really enjoy a bit of gluttony once in a while. And lust can certainly add a bit of spice to life on occasion. There are things I have done that I'm really proud of and frankly I cannot see what this has to do with knowledge. Human nature is such a frightfully undefined generality that it can mean anything the speaker wants it to mean.

Insofar as godhood is concerned I am completely in the dark. It holds very little interest for me considering what churlish childish behavior seems to be exhibited in all those legends about gods

There are a class of problems that are provably unsolvable by any finite algorithm, for example the halting problem for a recursive algorithm (usually implemented by a Turing machine). Then there are the incompleteness theorems for certain classes of logic. Also the decision problem for first order logic is not solvable by a finite algorithm. That means there are formulas such that we do not know if they are tautologies are not.

So there are areas of human inquiry known to be unsolvable or incomplete. None of this his spoiled our fun.

ruveyn

I have a few personal problems at the moment which take up quite a bit of my time but I'll get to it as soon as I have a few moments free. Mathematical proofs are frequently quite iffy.

Mathematical proof are among the least iffy things there are.

ruiveyn

How do you know your not just "lying to yourself"?
I judge things based on what I see. If something pompus is barging around striding for world domination, I have a problem with it, period. (ie, muslims, hebrews, christians etc). They think they can just go into another land, call it theirs, spread their little beliefs around to make everything suit them because they think they are better, and completely ruin every culture that was there before them. This isn't a lie, it's real and it's the truth. Not to mention all the other problems that I both did and didn't cover already. What I'm tired of are THEIR lies. Since one is convinced of something based on the evidence, it is known as a learning process, not saying something to ones self that isn't true for whatever the reason. Please try to understand this.. I do not like to be misunderstood.

I also agree with Shiggily, I too, see the problem when people stick their own arguments with so much certainty when they refuse to question the exact value and refuse to think of the value of possibilities, I believe that might be very related to selection bias, especially in discussions against religion or any belief system. I do also agree about the problem when science can become dogmatic.


well, science does that and have done that, and with time, these "speculations" have been either proved or disproved, but those shouldn't be ignored and be taken as "possiblities" while there is an amount of doubt at the same time uncertainty about an issue, take, dark matter and dark energy for example, I don't know what is your stance on that, but it seems that the theory came out to fill a gap, didn't it?

Such speculations are not mere speculations, but speculations (better hypothesises) based on observations to explain observation which can't be explained within the current theory. That is a normal scientific way.

I do have only a huge problem with speculations which are not based on anything else than wishful think or similar influences.

Testability (with potential falsification) is the key to the thing. If a guess (hypothesis) does not lead to testable predictions then one is pumping a dry well. Karl Popper's approach is very sound.

ruveyn

I think we can seperate different types of faith as being more or less plausible by their probability.

Standard theism is rather implausible from a rational point of view, whereas Deism is far more probable simply because I don't think that there is ever going to be any sure way of finding out what happened before the universe existed (even if there have been a series of universes spawning each other or in parallel, this does not solve the problem of the initial 'cause'). In fact I think it likely that this initial 'cause' is probably beyond human rationality (this does not automatically make it supernatural however) as after all, as has been pointed out, we didnt evolve to be able to understand the origin of the universe - everything we do know is probably a consequence of evolution for our survival on earth.

Classical theism however not only invokes God as a creator but many other things as well, which progressively reduces the probability of truth, particularly when some of these things can now be explained in a more logical way by science, and the possible inception of these traditions can also be explained, and furthermore there is so much conflict between different versions of theism. Although I cannot say that the Christian or Muslim God does not exist definitively, I put the probability very low and effectively, for the purposes of my life, consider it zero, because if I give it even as little as 5% probability, it requires a lot more thinking in every situation, and having spent already many years doing that, I have found it easier to lay it to rest and think about other problems instead.

With regards a Deistic God however, I have to be completely agnostic because I can't even put a probability on it. Dawkins argues in 'The God Delusion' that even this probability is low - his main argument being 'who created the creator' and the problem of infinite regress. But in a way I think he is taking his human logic too seriously and not considering its limitations and the possibility of forms of natural 'logic' way beyond the ability of humans to grasp. Whether or not a Deistic God exists however is rather irrelevant - if it created the universe and then did nothing more and cared nothing more, then we need not worship it or live by its rules - the only thing we can do is try to search for it, and I think physics is trying to do this (or the equivalent) anyway.

I search for God in my own way.