Debriefing > Off-Topic Lounge
God and the universe...
Kratos:
Konrad I love you. I think we should just close this or it may get into a angry discussion. Its up to you.
Rodney 1.666:
--- Quote from: Konrad Beerbaum on August 23, 2009, 08:49:12 pm ---I don't see much to discuss. There is a lot of circular logic in your post, and most of your "arguments" require a belief that a god exists to begin with in order to be true, so they aren't convincing to someone who doesn't believe that. There is also no rational reason that your version of a god is any more real than any other religion. Going even deeper, most of the facts or arguments that you base your reasoning on are huge assumptions that you believe to be true, and aren't able to be proven or disproven.
To give you an example, most of your reasoning comes down to: God is real because the bible says so. The bible is true because god wrote it. You see the flaw.
In short, you're free to believe whatever you want. However you are wasting your time if you are trying to prove religion using rational arguments when the entire thing is based on faith.
--- End quote ---
QFT
1Rusky:
I'm a Christian, but some of my views do differ from those of the Church. I believe that all religions will ultimately lead to God. All good men will find salvation except for those who have rejected Him. I've never gotten real big into reading the Bible. I think that some stories in it are meant to convey a moral and not all may have happened. I'm also not sure that God wrote the Bible, but rather those who were close to Him did.
I don't have a problem with anyone's religion or lack there of, only those who disparage one or the other. It's a growing problem in society today, too much is placed in materialism. The reason why evolution and the whole science thing doesn't do it for me is that it doesn't explain how the universe happened. There has to be something that comes before this and that; there must have been a creator.
I feel it requires more faith to believe in the science ideology than it does being religious. To just simply accept that after you die, it's over; just darnkness. That is way too bleak for me. There's a purpose to live. I'm not one of these people who say that God has a plan for everyone, I think that everybody can think for themselves and make their own way in life.
jjmusicnotes:
There are studies that show that individuals who believe in something larger than themselves perform better in all areas of academics.
I don't have specific numbers because I don't remember them, but I remember reading the studies.
From a religious standpoint, if God is all powerful, then God created evolution, and since you guys believe in evolution, then you believe in a thing that was created by God.
And although it has been said that you can't rationalize a belief, I am willing to bet that no one here has actually seen something evolve with their own eyes, and because of that, we cannot help but believe that the data reported to us is true. We cannot help but trust that the researchers who gathered the data know what they were doing.
The only reason any of us believes anything to be "true," is that evidence of the contrary occurred at a rate non-conducive to supporting different results.
The process of my logic, I think, can be held in accordance to anything that you percieve as fact.
And if someone completely negates the possiblity that I may be correct in some respect, they are no more irrationally clutching onto their "beliefs" as someone who believes in God.
Although Pascal's wager does contain it's logical fallacies, I think that Pascal introduces an interesting point.
To the athiest: What is so wrong about believing in something that promises to yield only positive reward?
I've heard arguments from athiests that say, "Well, what if I go about my life, live a happy life, help people, do good works, and am a decent person? Do I really need to believe in God to do those things?"
As I understand it, no, you don't. However, if you're an athiest, then you believe that after you die, you're just going to rot in the ground for another 10 billion years until the Sun implodes and then explodes.
So where's the motivation? If you think that the end result of your life is not contained within the measurement of those whom you help along the way, is not contained in what lies beyond the life of your flesh, then there's really nothing for you to look forward to is there?
Is it that you don't want to feel like you're "auditioning" for heaven? Is it that you don't want to feel like you're obligated to act or behave a certain way? Is it that you're afraid of feeling constrained, like you won't be able to live the life you want to live?
Or is it that you don't want to be one of those people "blindly" following God without any proof?
In the end, aren't your fears and worries all beliefs based on your perception of reality?
In my experience, all athiests ever do is try and poke holes in things that they're too afraid to talk about or explore.
You guys want to talk about rationalization. Ok.
How about we figure out the probability that our Earth, and everything on it, was created by chance?
Any takers?
It's easy. First you just need to figure out how much stuff is in our uniformly expanding universe (which, at it's present state is 13.7 billion light years in diamter.) Of course, assuming that we have just the one universe.
'Cuz I think quantum physics says otherwise. Oh yeah, that's a type of science.
Anyway, once you figure out how many things we have, you then need to figure out the most basic conditions that need to occur to support life.
Then you need to calculate the likelihood of the conditions for each "thing" in the universe to see whether or not life would be possible...
blah blah blah
and then you figure out how all those conditions just happened to appear in the Milkyway Galaxy, 93 million miles away from our sun.
You guys have a right to give JessEH a hard time - faith should be, and needs to be explored; something he was attempting to do by starting this thread.
However, if you're going to talk about this, at least have the decency to post more than one sentence in response.
All it shows is an inability to articulate your own rationalization of your own beliefs.
Don't fault JessEH for something that is inherent in all human beings, and if you think I'm wrong, then I would say that you're just proving the point.
@ Konrad -
Whether or not you want to believe it, life is based on faith. Faith that someone loves you, faith that you're confident in the skills that you have, faith that you're family is going to be there for you when you need them. Faith that you're going to be able to have a job every day.
Even the numbers that we all hold so precious, the numbers that quantinize our "beliefs" into what we percieve as reality, are all based on faith.
The number 4 is only worth what it is because all your life, everyone has told you that, and you have never believed otherwise.
To all the engineers and programmars, let me put creation in terms that you can relate to:
You don't believe that video games are created by random series of numbers and letters coalescing to form bits of code do you?
So why would you think that the universe and our existence is random?
Just because you don't understand the source code for life, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
Sporkfire:
I think existence itself is mindboggling itself, so I tend not to debate about my own.
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