If there is no God I welcome any atheist to reasonable answers or explain the following points. I am not ignorant or closed minded. These are personal conclusions that I have arrived at through logical considerations of truth. I invite you to challenge these ideas if they are different from your own.
Five proofs for God:
1. Creation
Our existence demands an explanation. Because we are here we must have been created. There is no other reasonable alternative. Though I understand this argument is circular in nature. It is no different from the atheist assumption that we evolved because we now exists. The creation explanation is superior to evolution because there is no scientific example that can be currently observed where a lesser state of matter or energy changes itself into a more complex state of matter.
It is only logical to assume that we were created by a higher source or power.
2. Clothing
Giorgio Armani and Giani Versace have the fall of man to thank for their success in clothing the elite of society. Apart from covering ourselves from elements of cold and heat a world-view without God has no explanation of clothing. No other creatures of the earth attempt to cloth themselves to the level that humans do. Genesis 3 gives the most logical explanation of the need for clothes. Having been created in perfection man sinned and realized his nakedness. I challenge atheist thinkers to give a logical explanation of clothing that does not include God.
3. Changed Lives
An overwhelming majority of the world believes in God. Inside of that majority are millions of examples of people whose lives have been dramatically changed by the Loving hand of God. The unexplainable medical miracles as a result of prayer. The reformed addicts who were given grace to conquer their addiction. The hope found in God that transforms our lives and gives us a purpose and meaning beyond ourselves. Explain this. Certainly if the change of God was minimal in effect than it could be dismissed. But the expanse of the effects of God can not be casually dismissed. And I submit it as proof of God.
4. The God tendency
At man’s core there is a natural belief that God exists. Religion has been a natural part of every culture ever encountered. If there is no God how do you explain the tendency of people groups who have never interacted with each other to come to similar conclusions of a Deity’s existence. For this reason you will not find a casual atheist. There is an enormous amount of mental energy that is spent suppressing the natural tendency to have faith in God. Atheist must constantly surround themselves with anti-God propaganda or their inner-nature will lead them back to an understanding of God.
The death bed experience of even famous atheist has demonstrated the God tendency.
5. An inner sense of morality
Most people,atheist included, agree that stealing and killing are wrong. Unlike animals people around the world have an inner sense of what is right and wrong. I have never met an atheist who accepts the notion that an unprovoked cold blooded killing is acceptable. We universally believe that taking another’s life is wrong. What is the origin of this universal morality? When God said he made man in his own image. It is this image, though broken through the fall, that stirs each of us with passionate hate towards unprovoked killing.
Where did that sense of morality come from? God.
I would like to open an honest dialogue in the comments section.
These thoughts perpetually verify God to me. They are not five all-inclusive reasons for faith in God. But they at least begin the conversation. My mind is open to your thoughts.
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Don't Step On A Tomato! 
Ho boy are you deluded.
1. Who created God?
2.We are born without fur and often travel to cold climates 🙂
3. 2/3rds of the world does not believe in the Christian God
4. Explain why much of Europe is now leaving Christianity behind.
5. It’s called “The Golden Rule” and it was thought of before Jesus and Moses. If you want to be treated nice…you treat your neighbor or friends or strangers nice. Man learns early on that life is easier if kindness is the rule.
Just off the top of my head…took more time to type it out than to answer each “proof”.
There is no valid evidence for a god of any kind…they’re all mythical.
1. God has always been. Because he created the universe he is not bound to its laws, he transcends them. Faith is necessary to accept this. Faith is equally in play when you say the universe evolved from nothing. Our existence demands an explanation and the explanation can only be arrived at by some level of faith. No one created God. Asking this question is avoiding the premise. Please attack it head on.
2. Clothes for the cold. I certainly mentioned both heat and cold. The point was the connected part they have in society as well as the shame connected to nakedness. Clothes are worn many times when it is not cold. Genesis 3 is a solid explanation of this.
3. I never said the Christian God. I specifically was pointing to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the world believes in a deity or deities. You can not spin this statistic. Some atheist would love to think they are so uniquely gifted at thinking that they have arrived at the truth while everyone else is a fool. But an honest mind must have a more concrete reason for this statistic than dismissing the majority of the world as stupid. What is yours?
4. Explain why Europe’s influence and economy is shrinking while other continents are growing immensely. The fact that a weakening continent is rejecting God is not an impressive point in your favor.
5. You would then say that the world should be forced to follow the Golden rule? What happened to free thinking morality?
Thanks for the dialogue. I do appreciate you taking the time to comment.
[i]Clothes are worn many times when it is not cold.[/i]
Yes, that would be true, but why would one get arrested while wandering around without clothing? That would be because the “Law of the Land” proclaims such behavior as inappropriate… What are the laws we have based on?
| There is no valid evidence for a god of any kind…they’re all mythical.. |
I made my previous comment because of this statement.
1. If your assertion is one of faith, then it isn’t an argument. You already lost the debate. A debate demands reason, not blind assertions. Your cosmic genie is defined to kill reason and knowledge.
Put in the simplest terms, since religious people seem to have trouble understanding why magic is not an answer, I am saying that no one cares about what YOU believe unless you can prove it. A reasoned debate is only about convincing others, not listing nonsensical beliefs proudly.
2. The shame attached to nakedness is a taught behavior. It comes from culture. It is not universal as we can see a number of primitive societies which do not wear clothes, and we see in practice nudist colonies and naturists.
3. The popularity of an idea does not make it true or false. Come now, you ought to know better than this. It is a rudimentary concept.
4. This is just an extension of your popularity argument. It is also a non sequitur in your followup reply: the economy has nothing to do with religious belief. One may as well point out that the average temperature of the Earth has risen with the rise in the number of Christians. Shall we conclude that Christians cause climate change?
5. Another article of faith asserted in lieu of proof. None of us care what YOU believe on faith (read: lack of evidence). If you are going to debate something, provide proof. Don’t just assert that morality is caused by your genie.
the word of me,
Have you read the Bible cover to cover?
On the average Atheists know what the bible says better than most theists.
Have you read the bible cover to cover?
You have not really tried to look for excellent arguments. These have been defeated by so many thinkers thru the ages much less just today. Example…#2 is obvious BS. Clothes were developed by people because they are useful. ‘No other creatures of the earth attempt to cloth themselves…’ because they do not have intelligence and so are locked into their present locations, where man has used clothes to allow us to live in very wide range of conditions.
The basic argument for all of these is ‘I’m too ignorant to find a good answer .. so g0d did it. This is not a good argument it should be ‘This is so so what is the natural causes.’ And if you can’t find an good natural answer then the correct response is ‘I don’t yet know.’ Just saying ‘g0d did it’ is plain laziness; that actually accomplishes nothing.
Example…For generations people said ‘sickness’ is a curse from g0d, pray and you will be better, and people died a LOT. SO ‘g0d did it’ leads to nothing . But when someone said ‘why is this sickness happening and looked at the evidence and work with the knowledge gained, antibiotics worked and prayer still does not.
“The basic argument for all of these is ‘I’m too ignorant to find a good answer .. so g0d did it.”
Thank you for putting it so nicely. LOL That is one way of looking at it I guess.
If you were to walk outside and see water dripping off of everything. All over the ground, water dripping off your car, dripping from the leaves on the trees, covering the concrete in your drive way. (You get the idea everything is wet.) Would you assume that it had rained? Obvious indicators lead to obvious conclusions.
You could create wild scenarios as to how everything became wet. Maybe a fire truck stopped by the house and drenched everything. Maybe the neighbor boy came over and soaked every inch of the neighborhood with garden hoses.
Not every person who believes in God is mentally copping out. I gave some premises. You attacked one of them without dealing with the shame associated with nakedness. People clothe themselves for more reasons than the cold.
The others you have yet to address. I am open to hearing your thoughts.
I did address the clothes but I did not address the shame because that is YOUR & others PERSONAL problem. I do not have it. I wear clothes because it is COLD in New England and pockets are just really handy. I don’t go nude on nice days because shame-filled twits got laws passed to put me in jail for doing nothing. And nudity is not important enough to spend the effort to go to a ‘nudist camp’ — pockets are just too useful.
I agree with the pockets. Still waiting on the rest. Good point on the pockets. They are useful.
“Five proofs for God:” More like 5 really weak excuses why you believe in god.
1. Creation
Yes, it demands explanation, but the naturalistic explanations for the origin of the cosmos are much more likely to be correct than ‘YHWH did it’. In fact, saying ‘YHWH did it’ has the same explanatory scope as ‘the flying spaghetti monster did it’. It explains and predicts nothing. It is not an answer, it’s a useless and empty assertion.
2. Clothing
Are you out of your mind? If we had fur like chewbacca then we wouldn’t need clothing. If we had fur like my dogs, we would walk around mostly naked.
3. Changed Lives
Actually, prayer is a nocebo. That is to say, if I tell you I’ll pray for you, and then pray for you, it HURTS your recovery.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/40765.php
Apparently if god is real, he hates it when you pray for other people to get well, and he punishes those people. Please don’t pray for me if I get sick; and for wotan’s sake, don’t tell me if you do. Plausible deniability.
4. The God Tendency
You should rephrase this the ‘gods tendency’, because much of the world currently, and historically, is polytheistic. People also think that monsters are under their bed, when they wish for something it will come true, and crops fail because of witches or demons. It’s a flaw in human reasoning that can be transcended.
5. An inner sense of morality
This is purely social conditioning. As for animals not having it, I submit to you this link:
Click to access swappable.pdf
Monkeys will starve themselves for days if by pulling a lever for food they shock a cage mate of the same, or another species.
Also, morality is powerfully relative; unfortunately so. During every serious moral debate (slavery, for example) there are christians and theists on both sides of the debate, arguing from their scriptures. One thing that is common about human moral intuition is that nobody has the same version of it.
Your post is powerfully lazy. It’s not even an attempt at thestic proofs. If you care about this subject, which I assume you do, you should actually read some sophisticated theistic arguments. They’re not at all irrefutable, but at least somebody has put some thought into them.
For a treatment of some of these proofs, I would point you to these two podcasts:
http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=11033
http://www.doubtreligion.blogspot.com/
I look forward to your reply.
You might do a lot better if you actually looked for where these had been answered, including actually speaking to atheists, rather than asserting that they have never been answered.
1. Our existence demands an explanation. Because we are here we must have been created. There is no other reasonable alternative.
Are you basing this on any evidence, or merely asserting? A handful of basic physical laws cause changes in matter constantly – the most obvious example is that big bright thing in the sky when you go outside during daylight. Energies transfer, states change. None of it, however, has ever poofed into existence, nor shown any evidence whatsoever of having done so. The most curious example, quantum dynamics, still operates in very distinct, and very small, parameters.
And as “the word of me” said above, your assertion is defeated by the very thing you’re using it to prove – the existence of a deity.
2. I challenge atheist thinkers to give a logical explanation of clothing that does not include God.
Okey doke. Our development as a species took place in an extremely hot environment, and by all accounts involved leaving trees for grasslands, and hunting ungulates through long runs. Shedding heat was paramount, thus the loss of body hair and the increase in sweat glands. Man’s dispersal throughout the world, especially into northern climes and during the last glaciation period, took place far faster than evolution makes changes, necessitating some kind of compensation for colder weather – our brains and manipulative digits took care of that, just like birds line their nests and mammals build or seek shelters. With the adaptation of clothing, the selective pressure for body hair was negated. Notice, however, the emphasis towards darker skin (warding off UV) in equatorial regions and shorter, thicker body styles (conserving heat and reducing surface area) in northern – all of which took place in recent times, within the past 15,000 years. Hint: that’s an eyeblink in terms of evolving.
3. An overwhelming majority of the world believes in God.
Not exactly. A majority believed in causative forces, often referred to as “gods” because it was easier on the language, but South America, North America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and frankly, every region except the middle-east, had entirely different views on what these causes were – several thousand variations, in fact, few of them agreeing on much of any details. The common element, if one can even be found, is just like you relate in #1, “cause.”
But just because we think something must be there does not impose this will on the real world – there is nothing that shows this is not simply a human conceit, insisting that some directed cause must exist for everything (especially ourselves.) It’s also relatively easy to make a case that this is a survival mechanism, one that spurred us towards greater intelligence, simply because we want to figure things out. I call it the “puzzle” drive, and it also explains why we play silly games and delight in puzzles, which serve no purpose whatsoever. Unless you view it in terms of making new tools, figuring out the behavior of animals, and determining how to grow food plants.
The unexplainable medical miracles as a result of prayer. The reformed addicts who were given grace to conquer their addiction. The hope found in God that transforms our lives and gives us a purpose and meaning beyond ourselves. Explain this.
Look closely at them, only do so from the standpoint not of trying to build up your belief, but of looking only at the details. The medical miracles are all older stories, and don’t exist in modern times – isn’t that funny? Also funny that modern medicine accomplishes hundreds of times more restorations to health than religion. Plenty of addicts reformed without god – plenty of others with what you would call “false gods.” Isn’t that curious? But feel free to point out, in some kind of useful way other than “Look, I like god!” how these changes took place – what special information, what divine change. We’re bombarded constantly by the meme that god = good; so? That’s cultural, not divine. Show me something actually divine.
Meanwhile, I have plenty of hope and meaning. It just doesn’t involve vague platitudes 😉
4. Atheist must constantly surround themselves with anti-God propaganda or their inner-nature will lead them back to an understanding of God.
You haven’t talked to many atheists, have you? If you had, you’d find that most of them are converted from a religion, and not through social pressures or the hackneyed old “rebellion against authority,” either, but because of the numerous faults with religion and the physical world making a hell of a lot more sense. Sorry, but this argument isn’t grounded in reality.
Meanwhile, take a look around you and see what you’re surrounded by. Do crosses and churches and politicians mouthing religious blather count as pro-god propaganda? Just wondering…
The death bed experience of even famous atheist has demonstrated the God tendency.
Really? How many examples do you have? If you make it past five, let me know. We’ll compare numbers with people such as Einstein, Sagan, Darwin, Feynman, Crick, Dirac, Pauling, Turing, Asimov, Clarke, Russell, Hume…
5. Most people,atheist included, agree that stealing and killing are wrong. Unlike animals people around the world have an inner sense of what is right and wrong.
Heh! Don’t try to argue animal behavior unless you have the faintest inkling of what it is. Most “animals” kill a hell of a lot fewer of their own species than human beings do.
Morality is a social drive, the mark of a cooperative species. We function and survive a lot better as a group than as individuals, and evolving a drive to encourage this is pretty basic – even bees have it, and they have virtually no brains at all.
Do you find slavery bad? Show me the lines in scripture that support that. I’ll be happy to show you the lines that encourage it. So where did it come from, then? Built into us? Then it’s built into countless other species as well, those without free will. How come?
And if this was built in by a creator, why then free will? Why introduce a conflict with immoral behavior in the first place? Why any conflict whatsoever? Is it more entertaining that way?
If you want answers, then the answers are out there – you have to be motivated to actually look for them. But if all you want is assurance, it’s easy enough to find only what you want to. Just don’t then ask for “honesty” when you’re not willing to abide by it yourself.
1. “The creation explanation is superior to evolution because there is no scientific example that can be currently observed where a lesser state of matter or energy changes itself into a more complex state of matter.”
This is blatantly untrue. Evolution of the eye by natural selection is the perfect example of complexity arising from non-complexity. Or if you want a matter energy relationship devoid of life, the formation of stars is another perfect example. A star is a complex organisation of high-temperature gases under pressure spewing forth vast amounts of energy… a complex oranisation that arises from decidedly non-complex gases swirling about in disorder.
2. “I challenge atheist thinkers to give a logical explanation of clothing that does not include God.”
This can’t be real. We’re a relatively hairless ape that evolved in tropical climates. What are we supposed to do to keep ourselves warm and protected?
3. “The unexplainable medical miracles as a result of prayer.”
Arguments from popularity and a deliberate misunderstanding of statics aren’t arguments for God. They’re arguments for the writer to actually research things. Prayer has no demonstrable effect of reality and this has been shown by several studies throughout the generations. Arguing that a god makes people happy and that a lot of people believe have no bearing on whether he exists. lots of kids believe in the Easter Bunny and really like eggs and chocolate too.
4. “For this reason you will not find a casual atheist.”
Wait, what? This is nonsesical. Casual atheists not only exist but every religion in the history of man has encouraged its believers to proselytize. Saying people see patterns in things even when no pattern is present is not an argument FOR the existence of god. Think about it.
5. “Unlike animals people around the world have an inner sense of what is right and wrong.”
Obviously you have never met my man eurypthro. Is an act moral because god says it is, or because there is a moral guideline that god has knowledge of apart from him? If it’s because god says it, then even if god tells you to rape a baby you would be morally obligated to comply. Is that moral?
6. “I don’t know, therefore GOD. GOD, therefore MYGOD”
I know you type this down, but it’s what all of your arguments are.
Bah, that’s what I get for typing in a hurry.
Think “didn’t” between you and type in that last line.
1. You are assuming just because you can ask a question it has an answer. When you question a reason for existence you are assuming the existence of a creator in the asking of the question. Lets try a different question as an example, What does the number 5 smell like? The creation explanation actually explains nothing. All you do is answer a question with another question that’s even larger in scope. (where did god come from) Further you are assuming a purposeful creation event instead of a cosmic accident.
You admit your argument is circular and you try to paint atheists with the same brush. You’re forgetting a few things, we have evidence and lines of inquiry where we test out our suppositions against the observed reality. Creationist have the exact same evidence that every other supporter of mythology has, stories passed down from priest to priest.
Observed reality: “where a lesser state of matter or energy changes itself into a more complex state of matter” I guess you’ve never seen grass growing. If you see it happen in a vacuum, meaning no outside influences, you would have evidence of Creation.
“It is only logical to assume that we were created by a higher source or power.”
No it’s not. You already admitted its circular. Just because you think you tarred atheists with the same brush doesn’t make less a lie now.
There is a lot here and I want to get to it. Thank you Justin and Doug Kirk especially. DK your explanation of clothes was very good. Certainly a weak point for God. I am not resting everything on that single point so you have not shattered my faith.
I am pressed for time but I want you to know I will be responding soon. Thanks for your comments.
I hold no delusions that I could change your mind. From experience, a deconversion takes a long long time and a drastic change in both what you think and how you think about things. Simply demonstrating how the argument for god’s existence fails is all I would hope for. Take it or leave it; but it’s still there.
Faith-shaking, on the other hand, is deliciously insidious and I hope I did that a little bit. I do hope you change your mind someday; like I hope everyone who is religious changes their mind. I won’t hold my breath though.
This is an interesting comment Doug Kirk. I am sincerely touched by your concern. I really do appreciate it.
I am equally interested in seeing people come to faith in Jesus specifically. I know my reasons for proselytizing.
Was curious why an atheist would want others to come to the conclusion of atheism? I appreciate the honest dialogue.
I want other people to come to the conclusion of atheism for several reasons. The first reason, quite simply, is because the claims of religion are false. And I don’t want to see false claims treated as if they were true. That includes all religions, homeopathy, acupuncture, faith healing, most herbal supplements, ghosts, bigfoot, unicorns, you name it. There’s a reason that in the history of the world, the number of times a supernatural claim has been replaced by a natural explanation is in the hundreds of trillions and the number of times a natural explanation has been replaced by a supernatural claim is exactly never.
The second and equally important reason is because religious thinking is harmful. It encourages people to be credulous and to blindly accept the assertions of authority while also encouraging tribalism and the relegation of people who do not think, look, or behave a certain way to the status of “other.” Which is universally harmful to human rights. There’s a reason the greatest factor in determining a person’s religion is NOT the veracity of the claims of the religion, the age, sex, or education level of the person, or even the primary religion of the community the person grew up in. It’s the religion of his or her parents. Every single recorded, major scientific advancement and human rights advancement since we first started brewing beer has been opposed by a significant religious element. We prosper IN SPITE of religion, not because of it.
It also hampers critical thinking in a great number of ways. It encourages the equivalence of facts and opinions and dissuades people from seeking the truth about the world around us and becoming properly educated about it in the first place.
It encourages lazy thinking like your post here.
I think that’s enough reasons.
“religious thinking is harmful”
The motivation for an enormous amount of charitable work in the world is religion. There are people that abuse religion and these people have controlled the spotlight. It doesn’t change the fact that if you removed religion the vacuum of charity would be devastating to the world.
“Every single recorded, major scientific advancement and human rights advancement since we first started brewing beer has been opposed by a significant religious element.”
Scientific advancements have been made by those who embrace faith. Sir Issac Newton said, “”Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done.” Certainly a significant contributor to science.
There are a select few fallacies that the church has rejected to the betterment of society. One of those oppositions is a right to life. Whether an unborn baby or an elderly person the church has fought for their life because of the value that is placed on each soul from faith.
The fact that the constitution recognizes human rights is a result of religion not atheism. “We are endowed by God with certain unalienable rights…” There is no doubt that people abuse religion. But a proper implementation of orthodox Christian faith will have a positive result in any society.
“a proper implementation of orthodox Christian faith will have a positive result in any society”
Ah, I see now. It’s not christian unless you say it’s christian, because christian can only mean good; even when bad things are done in its name. Very clear.
If you want to claim the development of human rights for religion, you also have to claim the instances of their violation for religion. And the latter is much much more prevalent than the former.
Also, it’s great that you are claiming religious charity as a sign that religion is not harmful, but you’re neglecting to mention that non-religious people give to charity too. And you’re forgetting that there are vastly more religious people than non-religious, and religion has had a priveledged place in society to the point that only very recently non-religious charities were acceptable, so of course there is going to be more total money in religious charities. How about the proportions? That’s like me claiming religious people are criminals because 99.8% of prisoners are religious. It’s a false equivalence and doesn’t say anthing about what you actually think.
Claiming that scientists are and have been religious but still were able to make science says literally nothing about my argument that every major scientific discovery has been opposed by a religious objection. The fact that religion can lead people to deny something for which there is ample evidential support in favor of something that has been directly disproven is evidence enough for me to conclude that religious thinking is harmful. And like I said before, it’s harmful because there is either no way to check the veracity of its claims but it still holds those claims to be true, or the claims it does make have been proven wrong time and time again and it encourages rationalizing away its inconsistencies.
Also, that was the declaration of independence, the constitution only mentions religion twice. Once to prevent any religious test from being a requirement for office, and once to prohibit congress from restricting or endorsing any sort of belief. The declaration makes a vague reference to a creator, but it’s been well established that thomas Jefferson was something of a deist so he clearly did not mean the christian god. Besides, the standard religious practice of that day stood in direct opposition to the values expressed by the founding fathers. Religious discrimination was widespread across the early american colonies (Witch trials? The governors of most states having to be christian?) and even endorsed by some.
If you’re going to keep willfully distorting my points and asking questions then evading honest answers; I can’t say I’ll be surprised, just disappointed.
I’m going to stick my neck out here and share my thoughts. Ben, I think your best arguments are creation and morality. We all fill in the “hole” with our belief systems. We all tend to have the attitude of “I know what I believe; don’t confuse me with the facts. Concerning things we do not understand or things which contradict our beliefs, we all tend to say “there is an explanation which supports my point of view, I just do not know what it is yet.” Whether Christians or atheists, we all tend to do this. Our goal is to look at the evidence objectively to see where it leads us.
I think one of the more difficult things for atheists to explain is the fine tuning of the universe. There are over a hundred physical constants (numbers/ratios) that must be precisely tuned to the tiniest of percentages for life to even be possible. This includes things such as the force of gravity, the ratio of protons to neutrons, etc. If any of these number is even slightly off, life would not even be possible. The odds of all of those number being right is next to zero. How do we explain that? Again, as a Christian, I would say, “Obviously, God did it.” Atheist would say, “We’re here, so obviously we got lucky on those numbers.” Even if all of those number just happened to be right, there is another whole set of numbers/ratios that must be perfectly right for life to arise. This begs the question as to whether we really want to believe in pure chance to bring this about. When you add the difficulty of explaining where original matter came from to create the big bang, atheism has some difficult questions to answer.
I think another difficulty atheism has in explaining origins is the enormous holes in the fossil record. Why do we find thousands of fossils of humans and thousands of fossils of monkeys but only a few of the intermediary species. If it really took thousands of years for each stage, should there not be thousands of each of those intermediary stages for all species?
Concerning morality, morality implies more than just what is right and wrong. It implies an obligation to do this or that. I am obligated to tell the truth even if telling the truth will cause me harm. To whom/what am I obligated? Myself? Society? If society dictates right and wrong, how do we reconcile different societies with different senses of right and wrong. The most blatant example of this is 9/11. The people who flew the planes in the World Trade Center were following a set of morals which dictated that they were obligated to do that. How do we determine whether or not they are right? If they are obligated to follow the morality of their society, we can assign them no blame or accusation of wrongdoing because they were technically living morally. How do we decide the morality that everyone should live by? As a Christian, I can argue that God makes the morality, and I am obligated to do what He says because He made me and therefore the rules I must follow. Without a God to determine morality, how do we determine a sense of right and wrong that all must follow?
Hello J Kendall,
The universe has been around for near 14 billion years…the earth and our solar system for about 4.5 billion years. Humans or near humans for a couple million. It is we who adapted to the already existing world…not a god who manipulated things so we would live.
Regarding the lack of fossils it is an extremely hit or miss thing for conditions to be right to fossilize and thereby save bones and such for our recovery. Most dead things exposed to earthly forces are completely lost. Recoverable and useful sets of fossils are very rare. Not everything that dies fossilizes.
Regarding morals see list below…my morals (and most of western cultures) are better than the God of the Bible…who doesn’t exist by the way.
• Slavery may be approved by God…but it is morally wrong.
• Demeaning women may be approved by the Bible…but it is morally wrong.
• Killing of pregnant women, babies, and children may be approved by God…but it is morally wrong.
• Raping of women and children may be approved by God…but it is morally wrong.
• Telling lies to convert people to Christianity may be approved by churches…but it is morally wrong.
• Killing people accused of witchcraft may be approved by God…but it is morally wrong.
• Committing genocide may be approved by God…but it is morally wrong.
• Religious intolerance may be approved by God…but it is morally wrong.
• Killing of children for childish behavior may be approved by God…but it is morally wrong.
• Keeping women from leadership may be approved by God…but it is morally wrong.
• Killing those who disagree with you may be approved by God…but it is morally wrong.
• Killing a man who takes a wife from another tribe may be approved by God…but it is morally wrong.
• Human sacrifice may be allowed by God…but it is morally wrong.
• Animal sacrifice may be enjoyable to God…but it is morally wrong.
• Murdering people for taking a census ordered by Himself may be allowed by God…but it is morally wrong
• Murder of those who do not follow Jesus is allowed by God…but it is morally wrong.
• Murdering homosexuals is allowed by God…but it is morally wrong.
Hey “word of me,” thanks for your reply. I appreciate your point of view, but I think that you missed some of what I said. The physical constants must be exact for life to even be possible. If the force of gravity were slightly stronger, the universe would collapse…slight weaker and everything would fly apart. If all of them are not perfect, we could not adapt because life (and the universe itself) would not even be possible. There would no adaptation possible because there would no universe or earth for life to even arise on in the first place.
With morality, I think you showed the weakness of determining morality apart from God. Why is it morally wrong to murder homosexuals like you claim (and for the record I do not support murdering homosexuals)? According to whom is it wrong? Muslims find it perfectly moral, even preferred, to murder homosexuals. Why is your definition of morality superior to theirs? What is your authority that says that murdering homosexuals is wrong? You can claim that in your opinion it is wrong, but you cannot claim it is morally wrong unless you are the one that sets the rules for everyone.
“The physical constants must be exact for life to even be possible.”
No. The physical constants must be very exact for our particular version of life to exist. You assume that mankind was the ultimate cause and not a self-aware byproduct. This is not supported by any evidence. The least of which being all the life on earth in the billions of years before us, including competing species of the homo genus.
The argument from fine-tuning is extraordinarily flawed and boils down to if 2+2=5 the universe would be different!!! Of course it would! But natural “laws” are not laws like human laws. They cannot be willing broken nor are they set by a lawgiver. They are a description of the way matter and energy act. They are a description of matter and energy’s inherit properties. Not the rules that matter and energy follow; but the way matter and energy exist.
Saying that someone had to perfect our universe for us is akin to saying someone had to sit down and decide 1 and 1 was 2.
I have a question for everyone.
Which Atheist site did dsoat drive by troll to get you to follow him here?
Daylight Atheism is what got me. Wouldn’t be surprised if it were a mix of many though.
FSTDT (short for Fundies Say The Darndest Things)
“An archive of the most hilarious, bizarre, ignorant, bigoted, and terrifying quotes from fundies all over the internet! The FSTDT archive is the largest collection of fundie quotes on the planet”
Your challenge to give a logical explanation of clothing that does not include God is one of the new quotes today.
Congratulations
I think I Stumbled on this site.
” No other creatures of the earth attempt to cloth themselves to the level that humans do. Genesis 3 gives the most logical explanation of the need for clothes.”
Are you trying to say that Heat and Cold are punishments from god and the “Garden” was of perfect and uniform temperature? The sun didn’t emit heat (as well as light) and the temperature didn’t drop at night? Well if you’re going buy the story of snakes that had legs and there was light before there were sun and moons and stars to emit light I guess you might as well go whole hog into magical fantasyland.
No other creature occupies the wide range of climates on earth that we do either. We need clothes to protect us from more than heat and cold, radiation, and the wind, it keeps grit and grime from getting into the creases in our skin. As has been noted before its a convenient way to carry additional tools. But I forget we’re all supposed to be mindless savages living in harmony with god except god didn’t want us there. Why else allow a duplicitous snake in a garden with 2 children who didn’t have the knowledge to know what they were doing was wrong in the first place.
http://unreasonablefaith.com/2008/11/24/genesis-3-god-screws-up-the-world-blames-man/
I am willing to elaborate. The genesis 3 account documents Adam and Eve living in a state of perfection. At this time they were naked. When Eve ate of the fruit followed by Adam the Biblical account says that their eyes were opened and they realized they were naked.
My point is there is a culturally universal practice of covering ourselves because of nakedness. I certainly would agree that there are good reasons for clothing. You mentioned some good ones house hut. But I would not agree that these reasons are at the core of why there is a universally cultural shame connected to nudity. I think that man perpetually recognizes his sin within himself and attempts to cover his nakedness hence clothes.
It’s only universally cultural for peoples where nakedness is considered taboo; which means it’s not universal at all. What about the multitudes of tropical tribes where nakedness is considered de rigeur? Are they not a clture? In fact, nakedness has only been culturally as shameful as it is for a few hundred years, the statues in the vatican used to be fully nude.
I encourage you to research your assertions.
“My point is there is a culturally universal practice of covering ourselves because of nakedness.”
I guess they’ve banned national geographic in the libraries where you live because it’s sinful. It’s really not your fault to think that way then.
“Apart from covering ourselves from elements of cold and heat”
I’m just curious why you don’t feel this is a logical reason to wear clothes?
Replying to “House Hut”
I came here via FSTD, where people are laughing it up at the ignorance!
2. Clothes for the cold. I certainly mentioned both heat and cold. The point was the connected part they have in society as well as the shame connected to nakedness. Clothes are worn many times when it is not cold. Genesis 3 is a solid explanation of this.
You didn’t make this point in your initial question, so I apologize for firing off a reply before reading your follow up. Can you explain what you’re looking for with “the…part they have in society”?
As for the “shame” issue, if you have small children (as I do), you should see that shame in being naked isn’t an inborn trait. Children will gleefuly run around with no clothes on until someone points out to them that they need to get dressed. The idea of being ashamed to be naked is something that must be taught, it’s not instinctive.
Heck, even in Genesis the idea of nakedness being “wrong” doesn’t come up until *after* they’ve eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Further, the level of “nakedness” allowed varies from culture to culture, and changes over time. It used to be in the U.S. that women were required by society to cover their entire lower body. When standards relaxed and women started wearing shorter dressed (uncovering their ankles), men were sexually aroused by the sight of ankles. Eventually, that waned. The more the body was allowed to be uncovered, the less likely it was that men (and presumably women. Being male, I’m focusing on male reactions) were aroused by those areas. Do you feel aroused when you see a woman’s arm or leg now? Of course not. You see women walking around all the time in short sleeved shirts and shorts. The “shame” invoked in uncovering these parts of the body has waned.
If you lived in a society where women walked around topless all the time, you would not be instantly aroused at the sight of a woman’s breasts. They’d be commonplace to you, and thus would not invoke the reaction that they do now.
Hi dsoat,
You write:
“There is no doubt that people abuse religion. But a proper implementation of orthodox Christian faith will have a positive result in any society.”
During the Dark and Middle ages when the churches had the power they killed and tortured indiscriminately…if you didn’t at least pretend to believe they would kill you. This of course was the orthodox church.
Evangelical fundamentalists today control the Republican party and a large group of them are dominionists who want the US to be run as a theocracy…we would all be subject to the rules in the Bible…a Christian State. I don’t think that would be a positive thing at all.
No, the best solution is to outlaw religion in all places but the home or church. It is much to dangerous to be allowed free reign among our citizens.
Get a group of religious US citizens together today and before long they are trying to get their dogma taught in public schools, insist that we are a Christian State, and tell us the earth is 6,000 years old, and Adam and Eve were real.
To the poster: your “proofs” are just questions in which you assert something unknowable as the answer, when it is really just another question. When trying to prove something, you don’t ask questions and follow those up with more questions. You have a logical flow, where the evidence leads to the answer.
Your “proofs” are all arguments from ignorance too. Instead of asserting god at every point you do not understand, try researching it beforehand. Learn about the topic before assuming that your ignorance is universal.
For example, if you researched your objections first, you would know that the natural process of Evolution by Natural Selection gives the impression of design. You would know that clothing is a natural product used to regulate body temperature and represent status, that morality is evolved in social species, and that god is not an innate concept of humans but one which is taught by preceding generations to offspring.
Your proofs are not proofs. They are possible explanations based on a presuposed worldview. You begin by denying God and from that point you explain things with answers that would only fit into your worldview. In your paradigm because the world evolved than the things you are saying must be true and no other answers can be logical. Your refusal to consider a point of view of faith causes your arguments to be quite weak.
Begin at the beginning. Where did matter come from? The answer to this question is the basis for a logical process of faith.
Certainly you can explain to people that the reason they believe in God is because they were taught to. Yet billions of people accept that a higher spiritual power exist. Why would mankind have ever started believing in God in the first place? And why is there such a widespread belief in God? Teaching that to children is an explanation that fits into an Atheistic worldview but, it is not a good explanation from a point of logic. This question raises the above questions and many more.
Consider that almost no sane adults believe in the tooth fairy, santa claus, and other fictional characters conjured up in modern society. However when it comes to a higher power the vast majority of people believe this. A logical explanation of this could be that the reason people continue to believe God is because He is true and the reason they stop believing the tooth fairy and Santa Claus is because they are fictional. That is not an ignorant assumption. I am not saying it is the only proof of the existence of God. But it is a logical conclusion. You can disagree but the only way you can call it ignorant is refusing to consider anything beyond your personal worldview.
It seems only logical to assume that if the vast majority of people have an inner connection to God simply dismissing this belief as a result of parental teaching is unreasonable. You must have a better explanation than that.
>>Your proofs are not proofs. They are possible explanations based on a presuposed worldview.
They are facts which fit observation regardless of religious beliefs. This is how science works. It observes reality, and only makes necessary assumptions, following parsimony, which can be tested and falsified.
Your statement here is not a rebuttal, but it is vague and used to deny reality, as if reality conforms to our beliefs. It doesn’t. That is why a Buddhist, an atheist, a Christian, a Satanist, a Mormon, or Hindu can all use scientific methodology and arrive at the same conclusion. They aren’t measuring their beliefs, they are measuring reality.
>>You begin by denying God and from that point you explain things with answers that would only fit into your worldview. In your paradigm because the world evolved than the things you are saying must be true and no other answers can be logical.
I begin by looking at reality. Just like Christians, Moslems, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, etc. do when they work scientifically. It’s funny because all these people are desperate to find their god, but scientific methodology permits them to work together in analyzing nature, and come to the same conclusions.
>>Your refusal to consider a point of view of faith causes your arguments to be quite weak.
On the contrary, because I don’t consider unfalsifiable positions, my personal knowledge advances. Welcome to basic science, where we only consider explanations that can be TESTED, FALSIFIED, and EVIDENCED. That’s how knowledge grows.
The only way you are able to maintain your denial of reality is to cast those who study it as being as clearly prejudiced as you are. Your entire spiel here is an attempt to equate the refusal to accept conjecture and magical thinking with the refusal to accept the basic tenants of evidence-based reasoning.
>>Begin at the beginning. Where did matter come from? The answer to this question is the basis for a logical process of faith.
It doesn’t work that way. Each branch works with each other but they are not necessarily interdependent. In other words, geology depends on there being a planet but does not depend on the big bang. Evolution requires life, but works regardless of how the planet got here.
You also miss the simple fact that scientists are comfortable saying that they do not know. The first step to knowledge is the acceptance that you do not know the answer and must seek it. This is the opposite of faith, which is certainty in something not known.
>>Certainly you can explain to people that the reason they believe in God is because they were taught to. Yet billions of people accept that a higher spiritual power exist.
Billions of us started from small tribes in Africa. What’s your point? That culture cannot spread?
>>Why would mankind have ever started believing in God in the first place?
Because after a certain age we are able to personify things around us. The television did not flicker off because of a random short circuit, it did so because it’s mocking us when we needed to watch the Superbowl. The seas are not unfeeling waters under the effects of gravity wells, no, they are angry. God seems to have evolved out of our personification of nature, from the simple gods of nature like river gods, mountain gods, and so on, to gods that demand sacrifices and care about how we live. This is what the evidence suggests when we look at preserved works of ancient man. They had simple rituals that grew more complex, with more and more elaborate religions.
>>And why is there such a widespread belief in God?
That’s actually a good question. Various hypotheses have been proposed, from the idea of god comforting people, to god and religion being a necessary construct to unify people into societies. We also know that wars were fought to spread one god at the expense of another.
>>Teaching that to children is an explanation that fits into an Atheistic worldview but, it is not a good explanation from a point of logic. This question raises the above questions and many more.
Again, this is your ignorance talking. If you look at statues and drawings beginning at tens of thousands of years ago progressing to now, you see that religion and gods have always been human inventions that grew in complexity.
>>Consider that almost no sane adults believe in the tooth fairy, santa claus, and other fictional characters conjured up in modern society.
Why don’t they? Because these are absurd ideas that can easily be reasoned out of. What if a society surrounded those same adults with tooth fairy and santa quotes and mottos? “In Santa We Trust” and “One nation, under the tooth fairy.” Once a week you are expected to visit a building and pray to them, and if you don’t believe in them you are ostracized from your community. You don’t believe in Santa? How can you be a moral person? You must not believe in anything. You must not believe in Santa because you love to be naughty and Santa prevents you from it. In fact, no nonbeliever in Santa can be a patriotic member of the United States. I know one thing, there are no non-Santa believers in foxholes.
I hope you can see my point that any silly idea can be reinforced by society no matter how useless it is.
>>However when it comes to a higher power the vast majority of people believe this. A logical explanation of this could be that the reason people continue to believe God is because He is true and the reason they stop believing the tooth fairy and Santa Claus is because they are fictional.
Actually, what you just did was use an Argumentum ad populum. But let me run with that for a bit. More than a billion people believe in Allah. He must be true then? What about the Hindus? About a billion of them believe not only in gods, BUT ALSO reincarnation. How could a billion people be wrong? In North Korea Kim Il-sung is praised for good fortune and is believed to be the eternal leader there. How about China? About a billion people there are not religious at all. So if a billion people do not believe in god or a higher power, that must make it true, right?
The simple explanation is that people believe in a lot of silly things due to culture and societal encouragement. If the Tooth Fairy had a church, there would be believers who worship her. You might even see people who believe that the Tooth Fairy is an explanation for morality, life, etc. Look at the Mormons. A man wrote a fictional book, spread it through a church, and now Mormons are a sizable minority who believe that Jesus spent time in America.
>>That is not an ignorant assumption. I am not saying it is the only proof of the existence of God. But it is a logical conclusion.
It is a logical fallacy.
>>It seems only logical to assume that if the vast majority of people have an inner connection to God simply dismissing this belief as a result of parental teaching is unreasonable.
Again, the number of people who believe in something is in no way, shape or form an indicator of its truth. That works for atheism too, by the way. I can’t call atheism truth because over a billion people do not believe in god, even though my number beats your number of American Christians.
You forget a rather simple axiom, Transgene.
Santa and the tooth fairy can be proven or disproven rather simply: put a tooth under your pillow or wait for Christmas eve to roll around. People don’t believe in Santa because if they don’t put presents under their tree, there will be no presents at all. And so, using the scientific method (hypothesis, experiment, conclusion), everyone has already come to the same realization: Santa isn’t real.
The only way to know with any degree of certainty whether god exists in any form or not is to die, and then find out. Since the dead have thus far not been able to tell us what lies beyond, we effectively have an experiment with no results to draw conclusions from, and so all we have left is a group of non-falsifiable hypotheses.
In other words, I believe that zombies will die (unlive?) if exposed to helium gas. You can’t disprove my belief, because we haven’t found any zombies yet to expose to helium. So my noble gas zombicide hypothesis has the exact same weight, scientifically speaking, as anything remotely related to the existence of one or more god.
The assumption that there was an Adam and Eve put on this earth by God is the only backing you have for your point on clothing. If you do not believe, as most of the world do not, that Adam And Eve existed then you go with the evidence that as man evolved, he made clothing to meet his needs in climates where he lived. Why do we not just cover our sex organs as most of the Adam and Eve stories seem to suggest.
You seem to be one of those real fundamentalists who are a danger to society rejecting science when it does not suit your beliefs. Another of the people who take their belief over facts, as a creationist pointed out to me in a recent discussion.
“a danger to society”
You have opened the door so I will walk through. The reality is that atheism is one of the most dangerous systems of belief for any society. A belief in the furtherance of the human race by survival of the fittest was the intellectual ground work for the holocaust. You are welcome to pretend that faith is harmful to society but tell that to the thousands who were helped in Haiti, the thousands who are being helped right now in Japan, and the millions around the world who are being helped by people of faith.
This summer I am looking forward to speaking to a select group of young men who, thanks to a program started by a person of faith, have chosen to leave a gang in the inner city. I will tell them that faith in their creator the resurrected Jesus Christ will be the answer to their future. If they follow Jesus teaching of loving others better than yourself, if they accept His gift of love, by His strength they can leave a life of drugs and gang banging behind. I am not running around telling people not to go to the doctor or not to take medicine. I am not hijacking planes and sending them into towers. At the very worst my “deception” is being used for good.
I am not sure if it is bitterness or a religious person that treated you poorly in the past but it seems that religion is clouding your abilities of scientific observation. Faith in God has helped and is helping many.
>>You have opened the door so I will walk through. The reality is that atheism is one of the most dangerous systems of belief for any society.
Prove it.
>>A belief in the furtherance of the human race by survival of the fittest was the intellectual ground work for the holocaust.
That is eugenics, not atheism. Try not to mix words up.
>>You are welcome to pretend that faith is harmful to society but tell that to the thousands who were helped in Haiti, the thousands who are being helped right now in Japan, and the millions around the world who are being helped by people of faith.
Because the Haitian earthquakes, after all were god’s punishment for Haiti’s voodoo religion. Remember how one of the big televangelists, a man of faith, said that? In fact this was after another televangelist blamed HIV on the gays, and 9/11 on lesbians, abortionists, etc. How about Westboro Baptist Church and their “god hates fags” campaign?
Look, I get that people can do great things due to their religion, but it doesn’t take much thought to list at least a few MAJOR blunders, stupid things said, major hateful things promoted, or just sheer acts of violence perpetrated because of faith.
>>I will tell them that faith in their creator the resurrected Jesus Christ will be the answer to their future.
Except it won’t. It’s just false hope, and when it fails it makes them more cynical and bitter and more likely to become nihilistic.
>>If they follow Jesus teaching of loving others better than yourself, if they accept His gift of love, by His strength they can leave a life of drugs and gang banging behind.
Do you know what helps people like that leave their street lives? Less poverty. Do you know who helps to orchestrate poverty? Take a guess. Religion is a profitable business in America, many evangelists take in millions of dollars and what do they do with it? Do they live like Jesus? No. They buy a mansion. I guess they never read the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. On top of that they use political connections to get tax cuts for the wealthy, and lack of regulations for big businesses. Thus creating a steep divide between rich and poor, and so we have gangs.
>>I am not running around telling people not to go to the doctor or not to take medicine. I am not hijacking planes and sending them into towers.
No, you’re not. Many religious people are though.
>>At the very worst my “deception” is being used for good.
Have you ever found out that your life is a lie? It really hurts. Try breaking out of religion. It easily makes you nihilistic because you lose so much trust in other people, including moral authorities. Atheism isn’t nihilistic though, that’s a common mistake. What happens is that when you lose something big in your life, you can become nihilistic out of extreme scepticism.
>>I am not sure if it is bitterness or a religious person that treated you poorly in the past but it seems that religion is clouding your abilities of scientific observation.
People become very bitter when they are lied to, and have been lied to repeatedly.
>>Faith in God has helped and is helping many.
Except for the kids starving in Africa, and those who are wasting away with HIV and AIDS. Except all the kids and girls in the middle east who are raped and cut up because of honor killings and sexual repression. Except for the constant hatred spread around against abortionists, homosexuals, atheists, nonbelievers, etc.
When you get rid of all this terrible evil, then maybe you can sell me on any good done for god. Of course, then it would be a matter of whether it’s good to believe in a lie if it makes you act better, but that’s a whole other issue.
Oh, I get it now. I feel dumb for writing my replies at all. You don’t actually care what atheists do or think, you just have this extremely stupid, extremely wrong mock-up of what you think atheists HAVE to be in order to justify your faith; and are attacking that. Fantastic, and extraordinarily honest of you.
>>Santa and the tooth fairy can be proven or disproven rather simply: put a tooth under your pillow or wait for Christmas eve to roll around.
You cannot disprove or prove a supernatural claim. Even those two claims cannot be disproven no matter how many tooths remain under pillows or how many people haven’t seen Santa.
What you are mistaking disproof for is a lack of evidence. Correct, we can show show that these claims lack evidence. Just like we can show that there is no evidence that god exists (prayers unanswered, no indication of design, etc.). However that is not the same as disproving god.
>>People don’t believe in Santa because if they don’t put presents under their tree, there will be no presents at all. And so, using the scientific method (hypothesis, experiment, conclusion), everyone has already come to the same realization: Santa isn’t real.
If that were the case then people would have stopped believing in god long ago: praying accomplishes nothing, the only way to make the man in the sky answer prayers is to do the work yourself.
The case is, every religion has an army of priests and bishops and imams and clerics making excuses for their faith and giving falsified evidence in favor of it. Christians in America have the creationist lobby, the religious right, and all that money going into it. Europe has the Catholic Church. Islam has Saudi Arabia, etc. All of this wealth and power goes into saying “our god is real.”
If we had the same wealth and power saying that Santa was real, you better believe that he would have a church and following into adulthood. We would have apologetics saying things like “The lack of presents are a test of your faith in him. He rewards goodness for goodness’ sake.” and “Santa gives us goodness! Without him our lives would be full of despair and naughtiness!”
>>The only way to know with any degree of certainty whether god exists in any form or not is to die, and then find out.
That’s a hypothesis, but remember that strictly speaking, even in ghost form you could not test supernatural claims. But your informal proof is really just “seeing is believing.”
Also, yes this seems extremely sceptical, but on the purely evidence-based worldview even your senses could be lying to you about god. However I get the point of your argument and am just nitpicking.
>>So my noble gas zombicide hypothesis has the exact same weight, scientifically speaking, as anything remotely related to the existence of one or more god.
Right. I’m not in the opposite position to disagree.
1. But you have the same problem with creationism. If nothing can ever spontaneously come into exist, if nothing can always have been there, then where did God come from? Who created God? There is no explanation for the creation of the universe
2. (I see above that you’ve decided that this one might not be the best of your reasons, so the following may be redundant:) Most other creatures have better in-built protection to the elements. Our ancestors wore clothes because it was cold out, and they wanted to preserve their body temperature, or because it was sunny out, and they wanted to protect their skins from burning. Over time, this developed into a taboo on nakedness. This taboo on nakedness is not inborn into us – a child feels no shame running around naked until she realizes that society considers this to be inappropriate.
3. A belief may bring hope and joy to people, even if it’s wrong. If a slave believes that one day he will be freed from the injustice of his situation, and be treated equally as he deserves, and this fact gives him the hope he needs to continue living, does that necessarily mean that he is correct?
4. What makes you think there are no casual atheists?
I am an atheist, and I do not surround myself with anti-God propaganda. In fact, I make an effort to seek out the arguments of theists – such as this one – because I believe it’s difficult to know when you’re wrong if you don’t know the opinions of people who disagree with you. I nonetheless am coming no closer to being converted.
Also, I’m just going to point to Justin’s comment about polytheism above. He said it better than I ever could.
5. Humans need to band together to survive. A lone human vs. a snake is kind of dead meet. Bands of humans can’t stay together if we’re always looking for a way to stab each other in the back. It is a major disadvantage to lack empathy as a human, and large groups of humans without empathy tend to die. And thus not reproduce. Since we are the descendants of the ones who didn’t up and die, we have empathy. Of course there are still some psychopaths, but they are by no means the majority and they have a severe disadvantage.
Ben,
Your proofs, or points, will not prove God’s existence in an atheist’s eyes, but they are brilliantly enlightening to someone who has personally experienced God. Unfortunately, I have found that if someone is dead set against believing in something (including God), no logic or reason in the world will convince him or her to the contrary.
Try to convince someone who grew up in an abusive home that true love exists. If that person has found only rejection in relationships with others, no logic or reason in the world will convince him or her that authentic love is real. Their mind is not the problem; their heart, soul, emotions, body, everything, has been ruined by their abuse. The mind is very powerful, but there are some things in life it just cannot naturally override. What that person needs is the experience of love. The mind can only discern what the heart is willing to accept. A person who has suffered profound and extended abuse doesn’t have the means to reason through a logical argument for love. They need to experience it first, then reason through their experience in order to understand it.
The same goes go for accepting that God exists. It is not the mind that first accepts truth. Truth is first felt for its peace, because it contains no contradiction. Unless someone first experiences truth, first hand, he or she cannot accept it intellectually. This leads us back to love. A person cannot intellectually fabricate an understanding of love without prior experience of love. But someone who has real love in his or her heart can provide that experience by unconditionally sharing it, demonstrating it.
If a person has not experienced God, no intellectual argument can ever make up the difference. One must first feel God’s presence. Only then can the mind begin to reason through that experience. Accepting or rejecting God is accomplished first in the heart, not the mind. Show God to others through your first-hand experience, then help them reason through the unusual peace they feel from that experience.
So in order to believe in God you must first believe in God? Excellent point. I’ll get right on that….
Thing is, I believe all sorts of things I’ve never personally experienced. i believe there is a great wall of china, I believe there are tube worms at deep sea vents, I believe there are planets orbiting stars thousands of light years away. i’ve never seen it or felt it, but I’m reasonably certain they exist. Would you like to know why?
Evidence.
There is evidence for those things. tehre is not now nor has there ever been IN THE HISTORY OF MAN FUCKING KIND evidence for anything supernatural, let alone “god.” There’s a reason that in the history of the world the number of times a supernatural explanation has been replaced by a natural explanation (Thought it was God getting angry, turns out it’s plate techtonics) is limited only by the imagination of the credulous, and the number of times a natural explanation has been replaced by a supernatural explanation (Thought it was electricity, turns out it’s angels!) is exactly never.
It’s interesting you equate your god with love, a subjective experience. Because we would never deny that you experienced something you thought was god. The same way atheists love and hope and dream the same as a theist. And if you stopped at “Well, god is subjective. So to me the concept of god matters. Although it certainly doesn’t actually exist.” I would be fine with it. then god is just another fictional character, like harry potter or kurt vonnegut.
But you don’t stop there, do you? You claim that god is real. Therefore, I expect evidence. Good luck finding any.
Doug,
| So in order to believe in God you must first believe in God? |
Notice that I said, “If a person has not experienced God, no intellectual argument can ever make up the difference. One must first feel God’s presence. Only then can the mind begin to reason through that experience.” One accepts God into his or her heart by first feeling God’s presence. The choice to doubt or believe is then a matter of choice based on personal knowledge, but not before then.
Just as the mind cannot understand true love prior to experiencing it, the mind also cannot truly understand God without first experiencing him. True knowledge is not information, but an inner knowing through first-hand experience.
You’re still saying that once you experience something then and only then that makes it real. And that in order to know whether or not something is real you have to first see it and then decide for yourself. This is patently ridiculous.
Also, I still find it interesting that you (wrongly) equate god with emotions.
I hate to burst your bubble, but emotions are not the neat and tidy extra-sensory force you make them out to be. They, like consciousness, arise from the chemical and physical interactions of the brain. The words love and hate and happiness are words we assign to concrete and objectively verifiable, consistent phenomena. And the words work because there is a general consensus on how the emotions make us feel.
Sure there is some variation on what some people consider “hate”, that “hate” to one person can look like “dislike” to another, but in general the definition remains cross-cultural. Hate in one language means hate in another. god, however, can’t even be as consistent as “hate” across the language barrier… or even within the language barrier!
The fact that “god” means something different to everyone (unlike hate or love) signifies that it is not an objectively verifiable thing. God isn’t even real enough to be emotional.
Unless god is just another fictional character, like harry potter or (and i had a bit of typo last time, forgot to include the character) kurt vonnegut’s kilgore trout. Something that doesn’t exist in reality and has no objectively verifiable evidence suggesting it does. in which case I agree with you.
| You’re still saying that once you experience something then and only then that makes it real. |
Doug,
I did not say you must experience something to make it real. Notice I said, “Just as the mind cannot understand true love prior to experiencing it, the mind also cannot truly understand God without first experiencing him.” My experience of, or lack thereof, and my understanding of or lack thereof, does not, and cannot, make something any more or less real than it is; only my perception is affected, which in turn changes me. The ability to perceive is non-existent if something cannot be what it is separate from perceiving it. Something is what it is whether I perceive it as that or not. If, and only if, I personally experience God’s presence, is my mind then able to reason through that experience. Prior to this, I have only secondary information, not personal knowledge.
| I hate to burst your bubble, but emotions are not the neat and tidy extra-sensory force you make them out to be. |
Notice I did not refer to emotions: “If a person has not experienced God, no intellectual argument can ever make up the difference. One must first feel God’s presence. Only then can the mind begin to reason through that experience. One accepts God into his or her heart by first feeling God’s presence. The choice to doubt or believe is then a matter of choice based on personal knowledge, but not before then.”
The sense of “feel” occurs in various forms and is not limited to emotions. When you draw your finger across a textured surface, your mind registers what your finger feels, but your feelings (or emotions) do not necessarily play a part in your tactile experience of that texture – albeit you may feel emotional should that experience remind you of a previous experience, good or bad. Your mind simply processes that tactile information and then registers the experience as personal knowledge. However, before this personal experience, if someone were to tell you about the texture of that surface, your mind would receive only second-hand information, not personal knowledge, whether you believed that person or not. And your belief or disbelief, in what that person told you, would not make that texture any less or any more real, or not real, than it is. Personal experience gives personal knowledge; second-hand accounts give only second-hand information.
The same goes for accepting or rejecting God. He is who he is whether we accept him or not, whether we have personally experienced him or not. Our belief or disbelief in God does not make God or unmake God. Our personal experience of God, or second-hand knowledge about God, does not make or unmake God. The ability to perceive is non-existent if something cannot be what it is separate from perceiving it. Something is what it is whether we perceive it as that or not.
If you feel God’s presence, you’ll not forget it, ever, whether you allow yourself to believe it or doubt it. Yes, your emotions and feelings may engage as a result of feeling his presence, but not necessarily by default – just as feeling a tactile surface with your finger does not necessarily engage your feelings/emotions.
One thing to keep in mind, Doug; there is no such thing as a purely subjective or a purely objective experience. All experiences are both subjective and objective because you and I, the subject, are subjectively experiencing the object, and in turn, objectifying our subjective experience of that object.
Sound thought always involves objectifying our subjective experiences in order to reason them through, and subjectively internalizing the objective to facilitate an internal awareness, but only by measuring our discernment against truth, the source of all non-contradiction.
And there you go again. This is unequivocably stating that god is real and an objective part of reality. How can that be verified? What is your evidence?
this is utter and absolute bullshit. it’s what’s known as a deepity, it sounds profound but it actually doesn’t say anything. there is no such thing as “true knowledge,” there is only “knowledge.” Facts don’t come with qualifiers stating just how much a fact it is. If jumping out a window makes me fall, that fact isn’t made any stronger or weaker than if i jump out the window and experience it.
You want me to slip into the solipsism you (claim to) espouse, but that’s just stupid. of course we perceive reality as a model of what it is, and no one person can ever be 100% sure of his world.
But that’s completely ignoring reality. if everybody’s perception concur and are predictable and testable and there are theories and models that hold true for all of perceived reality; it would be dumb to assume that we just have it wrong.
Sure it’s possible that everything we have observed that has been consistently verified throughout all the history of mankind but the probability is so small it is negligible. And assigning weight to that probability in our decision making is not only irresponsible, it is stupid and ignorant of consequences. You wouldn’t jump out a window because gravity might not work this time, would you?
And then you have things that aren’t independently verifiable, things that are really just subjective experience, like all your god’s fuzzy wuzzies or this “true love” you talk about that is somehow not an emotion? Are they real, or just hallucination? That is what evidence and tests are designed to determine.
Is the experience of god consistent between people who claim to experience god? Hell no. groups of people experience it based on their prior biases and experiences and its details are never universal between cultures and rarely shared between people.
Is the experience of love consistent, or even this non-emotion emotion, “true love?” Yes. Cross culturally and from person to person.
Is the experience of god predictable? As already established, no. God experience is wildly variable and demonstrates only superficial similarities, such as hearing voices and strong feelings (of fear or elation or relief, but never all three!) and not the actual content of it. The god in them is never consistent.
Is the experience of love predictable? yes, you can predict and describe what it is like to be in love and reach agreement and consensus. You can’t do that with religious hallucinations.
Therefore, god experiences are all in someone’s head and therefore the characters in them are not part of reality. That person is feeling something yes, but it’s not god communing with them. They just perceive it as that. And if god “speaks” to your or fills you with feelings of fear or despair, please seek mental health professionals before it gets worse.
Doug,
I said what I have to say, and my hope is that you will review our conversation from time to time. My hope is that someday, you will realize that for the first time in your life somebody was trying to be honest with you. My comments are not meant to defeat you but rather address your difficulty with accepting God.
I wish you the absolute best in your quest for truth.
Todd
That is so utterly condescending and pointless, I can only gape in shock at your false sense purported superiority. Thank you, but my life is fine. I tend to not stick around people who (like you) are intellectually dishonest. I hope someday you realize your delusion, and escape the authoritarian confines of religion. I don’t think you will, but unlike you, I don’t make libelous statements about other people’s personal lives.
Watch your step if you ever get off that high horse.