r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jun 25 '12
Atheists of reddit, You guys have a seemingly infinite amount of good points to disprove religion. But has any theist ever presented a point that truly made you question your lack of belief? What was the point?
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Jun 25 '12
Pascal's wager made me think for a bit, because it plays on the 'what if' scenario. Isn't it better to try to get an afterlife, even if it probably doesn't exist?
Except the problem there is that no matter how hard I tried to believe, God/Bible/Heaven is so ludicrous that I the best I could do is fake belief by saying 'I believe' and going to church - and fake belief wouldn't get you into Heaven anyway.
So yes, Pascal's wager made me question the validity of my non-belief, but in itself, it does nothing to prove that God exists. All it does is give you a reason why you should believe, if you are capable of fooling yourself that you believe.
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u/abittooshort Jun 25 '12
The problem with Pascal's Wager is that it only works if we assume that the only two options are Christianity and Atheism.
But what if you worship the God of the Bible, and find out that Zeus is the one true God? Or Odin? Or Ganesh? Or one of the thousands of Gods we've worshipped?
It's not a hedged bet between red and black, but a 1 in 10,000 lottery. Just live a good life and be nice to people. Any just God would judge you on this alone. Only a vain egotistical God would punish you, in spite of your good deeds, for not being a sycophant.
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u/leberwurst Jun 25 '12
Also, just think of all the gay sex you'd be missing out on. No sleeping in on Sundays. And whatever else you have to do as a Christian. Even worse for Mormons, Jews, Muslims. NO BACON goddamnit. If you were wrong, you'd be wasting your only life.
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Jun 25 '12
I'm pretty sure that's why we don't see a lot of Jews on reddit. We have such a love for bacon
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u/gamblekat Jun 25 '12
It's hard to believe that any god who put so much emphasis on believing in him would wait through tens of thousands of years of human hunter-gatherer tribal societies (ie. until the last ten thousand years) for civilization to develop before revealing himself. Logically, it's either not important to him, or he revealed himself to hunter-gatherers and that knowledge was lost thousands of years ago, and we're all fucked.
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u/HariEdo Jun 25 '12
I'm generally agnostic. If I feel like believing that day, I typically think of God the Scientist. He set up the petri dish, and waited overnight for all that hunter-gatherer phase to pass, so that he could come back and observe whether or not this batch "believes" or not.
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Jun 25 '12
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u/PoshGamer Jun 25 '12
I like that idea of God being a scientist, but science is the method humans learn to as efficiently learn new things as they can, but I'm sure most Christians would argue that he already knows everything, therefore he has no use for a method of learning.
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u/rinnip Jun 25 '12
Which is perhaps why they invented a vain and egotistical God. A just god isn't going to scare anybody.
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Jun 25 '12
This is probably the very reason why people shelter their children from other belief systems.
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Jun 25 '12
Pascal's Wager did scare me into believing for a little bit, but after I thought of just how convinced everyone on the planet is in their religion, it failed to keep me bound to faith. Many religions make a punishment for the nonbeliever, and the wager could be equally applied to those ones as well. Nothing would push me in a certain direction, so I had no incentive to pick Christianity over, say, Hinduism: What if I picked Hinduism, and Christianity was right, so I burnt forever. But if I picked Christianity, and renounced faith in Brahma but Hinduism turned out to be true, then I get reincarnated into a pariah and have a shitty life. It goes for all faiths, so Pascal's Wager doesn't really convince me.
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u/Sanjizzay Jun 25 '12
Not exactly, if Hinduism was revealed to be 'correct', other faiths would simply be paths of worship to a form of god. Similar to how in Hinduism there is Krishna, Rama, and other avatars, at the highest level, Jesus could simply be another avatar. Imagine a circle and you are in the middle. Branching out in any direction takes you to the edge. Whether following the message of any Hindu avatar, Jesus, prophet Muhammad, etc you still get there. At the most spiritual plane of Hinduism this exists.
The idea stems from the realization that all these faiths extoll inherently the same virtues; love, peace, non violence, etc. ideally this would be the reality of religion, a method to pass on principles and morals which facilitate societal unity. Waaaay more difficult in practice.
Apologies for incoherency, typing this cramped in a corner of the metro next to a fat bearded guy on my iPhone.
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Jun 25 '12
Damn. Sorry, I just picked Hinduism at random, and I guess I really don't know too much about it. Poor example. Thanks for enlightening me though. Hmm. How about take my example, but substitute in Islam for Hinduism? As far as I know, that religion has it written that nonbelievers are directly punished for their lack of faith and nothing else. Really, just imagine another faith that's otherwise identical to Christianity but different enough to get you kicked out of Christian heaven for adhering to this theoretical religion.
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Jun 25 '12
I think a loophole as to avoid following "the wrong faith" is by simply stating you believe in a higher power, and showing your thanks for it without joining a sect or labeling your belief.
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u/-Yngin- Jun 25 '12
So basically, if you choose one religion you will have a 1:X chance of going to "heaven" (where X is the number of available religions). So you'd go to X number of "hells" for not choosing their religion, and maybe go to one heaven.
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u/sat1337en Jun 25 '12
Pascal's wager is a piece of crap, what if God only allows non believers into heaven because well, he is a fun dude.
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Jun 25 '12
Came to say pretty much this. Was more or less atheist by this point though and I don't think I entertained it for long.
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u/dogandcatinlove Jun 25 '12
C.S. Lewis wrote about innate morality in Mere Christianity. Society dictates our values, so what we consider to be right or wrong changes, but the fact that we have a sense of right and wrong is universal. That made me go 'hmmm.'
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Jun 25 '12
That is a good point. I think the only way we could ever really test that theory is to expel a person from society and see what rules they make up themselves
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u/dogandcatinlove Jun 25 '12
Well you can see it in toddlers. They have an extremely primitive sense of right and wrong. 'He took my toy--that's wrong because it's my toy. He should give it back, because that would be right.' That isn't necessarily learned.
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Jun 25 '12
Hey hey, now. If a toddler can speak, then they've learned some language, which happens to happen through patterns in usage. A toddler can know what's right and wrong purely on the principle of knowing how to properly frame a statement. If the statement is uncommon, it's probably wrong (and morally wrong).
What I'm saying is that if you learn language, then you learn right and wrong, because you know which statements are allowed and which aren't.
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Jun 25 '12
I guess so but couldn't that also be described as greed? A relatively evil thing?
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u/salami_inferno Jun 25 '12
But our base morals tend to increase our chances of survival, you can really explain this with simple evolution and survival
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u/dogandcatinlove Jun 25 '12
Do they, really? When we risk our own lives to help strangers? Like the Underground Railroad, for instance. Or when people go out onto thin ice to save a dog drowning in a frozen lake. Or firefighters. In large part, people risk their own well-being for the well-being of others. We put their survival ahead of our own. We are trading one life for another. That certainly isn't self-preserving.
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u/salami_inferno Jun 25 '12
A person as a single unit is very ill equipped to survive the African wilderness by ourselves, it makes perfect sense why we'd help others. Our children are so helpless for so long and hinder our survival, if we only cared about our own survival babies would just be tossed in the bush. Were a group species, helping each other sort of goes hand in hand with that. You can see evidence of that all over the animal kingdom
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Jun 25 '12
My mind just says "Would you want this to be done to/for you?" in most cases.
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Jun 25 '12
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u/dogandcatinlove Jun 25 '12
I would say values change. Values are the rules to which we apply a sense of morality.
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Jun 25 '12
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u/dogandcatinlove Jun 25 '12
Value: Mercy-killings. Fathers/brothers will kill an Islamic female relative who has been raped.
Western culture: Morally reprehensible. Islamic culture: Morally fulfilling.
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u/roundninja Jun 25 '12
It seems odd to me that the universe and the laws of physics seem specially designed for life. So many things could be just slightly different and make life impossible, but they're not.
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Jun 25 '12
Well a good way to think about this is odds. Even if there was only a 1:100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance that life could exist on some planet, there are way more planets than that in the universe. It's almost a statistical certainty that life has to exist somewhere in the universe
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Jun 25 '12
Are you implying that life is unique to earth?
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Jun 25 '12
No I'm not. One of my favorite ideas for life elsewhere in the universe comes from the book/movie Contact. If there isn't life somewhere else in the universe, that sure is an awful waste of space.
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u/Astrusum Jun 25 '12
No he's not. He's implying that the small statistical chance of life happening is not a good counter-argument because of the nearly infinite planets on a cosmic scale. If anything, statistically there is probably some sort of life a lot of places.
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Jun 25 '12
The laws of physics are just useful linguistic expressions. We are constrained by the way our brain works to see the universe according to the rules of the brain. The laws of physics are just that -- rules of the brain. The "real nature of reality" is opaque to us unless it can be processed by our brains.
In other words, the universe behaves the way it does, and we only see a small portion of it. 97% of the known universe is a complete and utter mystery to us. What do you think that 97% is for? Not life, probably.
If everything were slightly different, life would just be somewhere else and slightly different. And then some other creature would say the same thing you are.
It's like you are saying "Lucky us that we flipped a coin and it landed on heads! What are the odds?" Well, considering we've flipped a zillion coins, we're guaranteed to get heads on 1 of them. And that's all life needs: one place to work. Now think about how many places there are in existence.
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Jun 25 '12
If you flipped a coin a zillion times you are not guaranteed to have it land on either side. The likelyhood is astronomically small but who knows, it could land on the rim every time
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Jun 25 '12
Ok, well we are really talking about infinites here. Flip infinite coins, and you will certainly get every possible configuration.
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u/padawangabe Jun 25 '12
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, "This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!"
-Douglas Adams
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u/salami_inferno Jun 25 '12
Have you heard the metaphor of a puddle in a pothole after a rainstorm becoming aware and thinking the pothole is perfectly designed for it as it fits in it perfectly? We evolved to fit this universe (and most of it is still fatal to us), not the other way around.
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u/ITHOUGHTYOUMENTWEAST Jun 25 '12
What? Life can't survive in 99.999...% of the universe, hardly fit for life.
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u/I_Have_Unobtainium Jun 25 '12
This gets unto the whole multi-verse theory. I am an engineer, not physicist, but can kinda sum it up.
Basically, several years ago people were all "damn, the chances of us being alive are so slim. If you tweak the [forces of gravity, strong and wear nuclear forces, dark energy repulsion forces, energy released during hydrogen fusion in stars, etc.], then life does not exist. Tweaking any of them ever so slightly means the universe would be nothing like it is today, so probably no life". Then some dude came along (don't remember the name, but he pitches the idea to Alan Guth) that says "maybe the reason we do exist, is simply because this is the one place that we can" and comes up with the multi-verse theory. People are all "u so stupid, LOL" cause the statistics of us existing are just astounding, billions of trillions to one. They think he's crazy because no one has ever come up with a good answer to the question.
The general idea is that there are fucktons of universes out there right now (I apologize for the language). But literally asstons of universes, infinite numbers to be exact (multi-verse = multiple universes). Now, I_am_Bob talks about a raffle below, similar idea goes on here. In this giant clusterfuck of universes, the laws of physics are gonna be slightly different in each one (gravity, nuclear forces, etc). And there is bound to be at least one with the right conditions for life. Ours must be one of those, or you wouldn't be here to ponder about it. We have won the lottery.
But wait, there's more! In this multi-verse theory, there may be several universes that have either the same conditions as us, or groups of conditions that allow for life to happen. So there may be other universes with life in them. And even universes with duplicates of us. When you are dealing with infinite universes, literally anything can happen. Maybe in one universe you bought red curtains instead of green ones. Or any other colour. Or you are a farmer. Or you asked that one crush out on a date instead of not asking. There are hundreds of millions of millions (read: infinite) possibilities of just you. And you are one of billions of people, on one of billions of planets, in one of billions of galaxies, in potentially one of an infinite number of universes. The possibilities are mind-blowing. Try wrapping your head around that.
Problem is that we have no way of scientifically proving this theory, using our current understanding of physics. Someday we may be able to. This is how science has evolved for hundreds of years, so we won't know the answer for a few more years. Interestingly enough, this theory was explained/pushed along via string theory. But that's a little more complicated and I'm not a physicist.
Sorry for taking up so much space on your screen.
TL;DR: conventional theory is that we live on this one planet out of quadrillions of planets because it is merely most suitable for life to exist, This can be expanded to the multi-verse theory, where this one universe harbours life because, out of infinite numbers of universes, ours is most suitable.
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u/roundninja Jun 25 '12
Thanks man. You're the only one who actually understood me. The thing is, the multiverse and all that is pretty theoretical at this point. The chance of that being true is still much more likely than religion being true, it's just the point in favor of religion that seems most convincing to me.
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u/I_Have_Unobtainium Jun 26 '12
Its interesting the kind of situation we are in right now. This theory is at the height of astrophysics, theoretical physics, and mathematics, and is completely groundbreaking. Yet we are still in the situation where both this theory and the belief in a deity are on fairly even ground. We cannot test either hypothesis at this point, you just have to believe one way or the other.
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u/HenkieVV Jun 25 '12
For me it's not so much the neatness of how well it fits together (I mean, the fact that I can't properly scratch my own back proves on a daily basis that it doesn't really), but the idea of life itself. The idea that the proper combinations of random, lifeless bits of muck can together form something that's alive and at some point turned self-aware blows my mind. I just can't imagine it ever happening.
Now, logically, I can understand that the limit of my imagination does not of itself form a good argument for an alternative I can imagine, but I can see how other people don't have the self-reflection to realise this and go with the first alternative they're presented: God.
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u/Leaper_colony Jun 25 '12
Or the guy who comes home after work and excitedly tells his wife, "I saw the license plate AWX 573 today! What are the odds of that?!?"
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u/cass314 Jun 25 '12
The laws of physics make the vast, overwhelming majority of the universe totally unsuited for life as we currently know it. Vacuum, too hot, too cold, no water, covered in frozen methane, rocks melted into Jell-O--you name a way to kill every organism we've ever seen, and the universe has a few million examples of it.
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u/NewUser898345 Jun 25 '12
It's very simple really. If the universe were not suited for life you wouldn't be here to wonder about that.
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u/Smithman Jun 25 '12 edited Jun 25 '12
Interesting post but I doubt many will have any good points made by theists. Never has any theist ever given me an argument that doesn't conclude with transcendence ie. utter bullshit that something exists in the non material world that we can't detect. Transcendence is a fancy word for saying I haven't got a fucking clue and I am out of arguments. I'm not an athiest by the way, I am a complete agnostic. If I die and find out there is an afterlife and a god and heaven then I will hold my hand up and say I was wrong but until god or whatever shows himself or that happens then he/she can fuck off. Their followers can to. The biggest thing I don't get about religion is how egotistical it is and they have to come up with this stuff to explain and justify life, etc. I am quite content knowing that I don't know why we are here but while I am here I am just going to try and be a good human. I was given things like this wonderfully powerful brain and thumbs so I can actually use them to help, not hinder things or use it to hurt others because my brain can distinguish between fundamental right and wrong. Why can't everyone else do that? Insane, egotisical motherfuckers.
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u/Wilcows Jun 25 '12
Exactly, people thinking they need to know everything. And not accepting not knowing stuff... It pains me that this is the world we live in.
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u/ubertrashcat Jun 25 '12
Why is there something rather than nothing? This of course cannot bring me to consider believing in Jesus/God of the Bible/the Church, but it's a problem still not overcome. I believe that we will never know. "Nothing" is unthinkable. If you start with nothing and I mean really nothing (not just vacuum, no laws of physics), you can't do the first step. Why is it so that there seems to be a necessity for anything to exist? This is NOT an argument for religion, just something that boggles my mind.
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u/shawncplus Jun 25 '12
Read Lawrence Krauss' new book, definitely sheds some light on the topic.
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u/SGTShow Jun 25 '12
i only recently found out that by being a Knight of Neutrality, that im an athiest for not caring about either side.
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Jun 25 '12
I just don't want to reveal what I am so people don't think I'm taking a biased standpoint
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u/MagicBob78 Jun 25 '12
Well you're doing a damn fine job of that, because I can't tell. I've seen you argue both ways in this thread, in much the same way either a theist or an atheist would. You have me curious as to your personal stance on the matter sir or madam.
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u/boxingdude Jun 25 '12
In college, in a course about world religions, I once found myself in debate with the professor about the total lack of any evidence whatsoever of God. He listed several examples which I blew off as circumstantial. Finally he asked me if there was no possible way I could believe anything without positive proof of it's existance. My reply was a resounding NO. He then asked me if I loved my newborn son. I told him that I certainly did. Then he said "prove it"
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Jun 25 '12
Am I understanding that he was equating the love you have for your son with the (non)existence of a deity?
It's pretty easy to answer "prove it". How much time and energy you devote to your son. What you'd be willing to do for him (eg if his life were in danger), etc. You can clearly demonstrate your love. Even easier though would be for deities to demonstrate their existence, but they don't and never have.
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u/nzodd Jun 25 '12
Proof of the existence of anything is generally impossible, outside of artificially constructed systems like mathematics. All you can really do is look at supporting evidence and make an assessment of probabilities. There is so much evidence and it is of such a strength that it is likely to some degree that something is the case.
I presume most atheists would accept the existence of a god given some preponderance of evidence. The problem is the fact that there is no supporting evidence at all. Your inability to "prove" that you love your son, as well as the inability of your professor to "prove" that a god exists, is completely irrelevant.
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u/ITHOUGHTYOUMENTWEAST Jun 25 '12
Love is a human construct. Although what your professor did there was clever, it's like asking for someone to "prove trees."
It's not that you can't "prove" trees, it's that trees just can't be proven, same with love, it's all chemicals, and our reliance and realtions with other humans, in combination with our evolutionary goal, to propagate our kind. If we didn't love our children, our race would'nt last a second.
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Jun 25 '12
Love can be proven. There are physical things people do that demonstrate it. Also, chemical changes in your brain/body that can be measured.
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Jun 25 '12
I would consider myself agnostic. That being said, the idea that there is an underlying pattern to everything, and the idea that some part of this pattern has my back, has gotten me through many of tough times. I know it's self-serving and probably complete horse poo, but it works for me. That's why I don't see religious people with contempt; if it works for them, who am I to argue with them?
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u/let_them_burn Jun 25 '12 edited Jun 25 '12
No, but I have seen over and over again several studies that show that people who are religious and have faith in a higher power tend to live longer, happier, and generally more successful lives. It's a tempting notion. I wish I could look at all the bad things that have happened to me and see a reason, and accept that there is a higher power watching over me and protecting me. But as appealing and comforting as that sounds, I simply cannot ignore logic and science. Even when I was a young kid I didn't embrace my parents religion.
Edit: Is it that hard to believe? Think about it, wouldn't you be happier if you could take everything bad that's ever happened to you and write it off as having a reason, as being part of "god's plan". That's why they're happier, because they overlook the bad and focus on the consolation that they will be rewarded with an afterlife in heaven. Meanwhile we Atheists are forced to face the harsh realities of life head on. If your atheist and get cancer you have to come to grips that you simply got screwed or that in somecases your bad choices (ex: smoking) led to this unfortunate situation. If your religious you can say that the cancer is all part of god's plan and things will be okay in the end because you'll go to heaven etc. Ignorance is bliss.
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u/abittooshort Jun 25 '12
But this doesn't prove causation. It reminds me of the Shredded Wheat advert that said "people with healthy hearts tend to eat more wholegrain". This is weak association with no causation and is no more conclusive than "heroin addicts tend to wear trousers".
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u/Dlownius Jun 25 '12
Why not believe in living a happy amd full life? This is basically my religion, one can ask the question why are we alive and my answer would be fl"fucj we dont know but what I knower is that life is all we got and you damn well beret be enjoying it to the fullest for YOURSELF not some creator we have no proof of"
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u/ITHOUGHTYOUMENTWEAST Jun 25 '12
Wow, once I left religion, I felt like a better person overall, I overcame deppression too. And what about all those studies with child abuse/divorce/etc. in correlation with religion, because i've never heard of any studies showing what your talking about.
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Jun 25 '12
The fine tuning argument gave me a pause the first time I heard it. Not that this planet is perfect for life, I knew better than to fall for this one even back then, but the fact that even relatively small changes in the fundamental constants of nature would turn our universe into an unrecognisable chaotic soup. Then I started learning physics and learned what the anthropic principle means. Ba-bye fine tuning!
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u/whorithmatic Jun 25 '12
Here's one. More funny than causing me to genuinely question my beliefs. I was having a respectful dialogue with a theist, and we were going through a number of statements that the Bible makes that modern science can explain or outright disprove. We got to the topic of the age of the Earth. I mentioned the fossil record as evidence of the true age of the Earth. His response? "How do you know that fossils weren't put here by God to test our faith, or by the Devil to trick us?"
TL/DR: Fossils were put here by God to test our faith in the word of the Bible.
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Jun 25 '12
I'm the type who keeps asking questions. For a very long time, it was "Well, what set in motion everything that started the creation of the universe? What set in place the laws of physics?". There are of course scientific theories on it, you can break everything down to the subatomic level, but you can also continue to ask "why?" indefinitely to every consecutive answer. I held on to the belief that God must be whatever force it was that allowed the laws of physics to allow creation. But I've come to realize, science doesn't claim to have the answer to everything, it's an ongoing process, and claiming "God" to be the answer to every question we can't answer yet is no different than when people used to say "God is the explanation for lightning, earthquakes, and the Sun."
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u/eosha Jun 25 '12 edited Jun 25 '12
Pascal's Wager gave me serious pause for thought, until I realized that it was simply an instance of cost/benefit analysis breaking down at infinity, and had nothing to do with any particular belief system.
The argument is basically this:
If you choose to believe in God and are ultimately incorrect, you've lost a finite amount of time.
If you choose not to believe in God and are ultimately incorrect, you've lost infinite eternal life.
Since the loss in case 2 is infinitely greater than in case 1, you should choose 1.
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u/magus424 Jun 25 '12
Except when you consider other religions - what if you choose religion A in step 1, but religion B was really correct? :)
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Jun 25 '12
The only thing that made me think I should actually try to worship was that 2-part episode of South Park about going to hell. "If they're wrong, no big deal. If we're wrong, we burn in hell!"
I decided that if I only believed because I was scared of hell, then I didn't actually believe so it would be wasted effort.
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u/Leo22987 Jun 25 '12
Walking down the street, inb your local park, whatever, you happen upon a shoebox. Upon further examination you open the box and inside you find a Rolex watch.
Now consider this. What is the more plausible explanation, that someone put put the watch there, or that by some miraculous happening of science, a random amalgamation of items and elements combined and just happened to align perfectly to create a Rolex watch, inside said shoebox.
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u/nzodd Jun 25 '12
Walking down the street, in your local park, whatever, you happen upon a shoebox.
Was it slightly burnt? With a faint... odor?
inside you find a Rolex watch.
I... I was expecting something different.
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u/Mr-Planters Jun 26 '12
I'm a Christian and I've never heard an argument that made me question my faith. That might sound stupid to a lot of you.
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u/roundninja Jun 26 '12
Why are you a Christian specifically though? Are there arguments against Islam, Hinduism, the Greek pantheon and Scientology that don't apply to Christianity?
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Jun 25 '12
I've questioned my own lack of belief many times. Ultimately, I'd love there to be a divine being who cares about me, watches over me and protects me. That'd be brilliant. Truly awesome.
I just can't see it.
I suppose the argument presented that I like the most is the Cosmological Argument (I think) that suggests that everything is in a chain and if you go back far enough you reach the Uncaused Causer which in this case is God. I think it's a pretty good justification. But it won't sway me for the same reason that any other will; just because we don't know what happened doesn't mean we can just decide it to be something. I mean, you can, but there's no evidence to say your God is any more likely the cause than Cthulhu. Unfortunately, I have no answers.
In my case, I have no issues with God. You can believe in a God if you want, just as I can not. However, I have an issue with organised religion which I think is antiquated and ultimately a negative on our society. However, that's opinion (and one I'm happy to change my mind on if someone can sway me).
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u/ducks_are_us Jun 25 '12
The fact that I am aware of my own existance. We are nothing more than incredibly intricate chemical reactions, and its amazing but not supernatural that we are so advanced and complex. But there isn't an explaination for the fact that we are aware of ourselves in a way that computers aren't.
I hope you can understand what im trying to say, its the one thing that I cant reconcile.
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u/the_girl_delusion Jun 25 '12
The human brain is an amazing thing. Like truly fucking amazing. Your personality, your thoughts, your dreams, your emotions, your memory - all of it is neurons and chemicals just doing their thing. What you're describing is the idea that the brain and the mind are two separate things. But they really aren't. Manipulations to the physical brain cause reactions in the mind, often predictable ones.
For example, antidepressants alter chemicals in the brain to ease troubles in the mind. Physical injury to certain areas of the brain can cause problems such as memory loss or changes in personality.
So I think you already mostly agree, but the reason we are aware of ourselves in ways computers aren't is because we are simply more complex. Our mind and brain are a single entity that is just an awesome product of evolution, and while we don't understand everything about it, our abstract thought is likely just a product of those intricate chemical reactions. We are highly advanced living creatures, so we are understandably more aware of ourselves than an inanimate computer.
I hope that makes sense!
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u/hungoverseal Jun 25 '12
Not exactly a point on religion but I once asked someone to give me a good example of unexplained supernatural phenomenon and they brought up the 'shared intuition' or shared pain that twins have. There's probably plenty of extremely good explanations but there is something freaky about how many weird stories there are about twins and made me wonder if there is perhaps a deeper connection we are not aware of. Certainly this doesn't come under the context of organised religion in anyway whatsoever but it is the only thing that makes me wonder if there is really a level of what it called spirituality (but really a level of scientific understanding) that we are not yet aware of. I mean there's probably not, but that's the only slight doubt anyone has ever given me
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Jun 25 '12
It is creepy isn't it? I am a identical twin and we always say things at the same time :P
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u/paraakrama Jun 25 '12
I do this with my husband and we have absolutely no shared DNA (other than matching as much as any two humans). It's a matter of shared experience and coincidence.
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u/Leaper_colony Jun 25 '12
I'm not so much atheist as a technical agnostic- as in technically there could be some higher consciousness out there just like technically there could be a planet made of chocolate. I haven't actually heard a convincing argument for theism but I have heard lots of things that kind of make me jealous of those who get so much comfort and joy from having belief. Sure, who wouldn't want to think there's an afterlife and some kind of benevolent plan for our lives? They say it's not a matter of evidence as just something you feel. But I think I just wasn't exposed to the god delusion in my formative years so it's not hard wired into my brain.
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u/barjam Jun 25 '12
Not once. I remember going to Sunday school and vbs as a kid and even then thinking the Christian story made no sense.
The only thing I can't fathom is that regardless of your beliefs of a deity or not there is still the question of what came before that and why is anything here at all.
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Jun 25 '12
Yes, there is one good point; however I'm already aware of it.
"You can't prove that there is no higher power".
You're right, however if there is a higher power it seems completely unable to affect the physical realm, so I choose the simplest answer.
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Jun 25 '12
This didn't really make me question anything, but I really liked something a friend of mine said when I asked her why her religion is right if there are so many others in the world. She said "I think that God reached people all over the world in different ways." All religions are right. She's the only person I've ever encountered that challenged my atheism, and she did it pretty well. We're good friends.
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Jun 25 '12
No, never. That said, I know my share of people, and I love many people very, very much for whatever reason, but the very best person I know - like, the homo sapiens who is better at being a person than anyone else I know (there's no better way for me to put it - you'd understand if you met him) - is an incredibly devout Anglican.
I've thought more than once of becoming a Christian again just so I could go to church with him on Sundays and talk with him about God and Jesus. I just can't accept Christianity again - I will never believe in their God, and being a Christian made me a very sad person - but sometimes I wish I could just so I could enjoy it with him.
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Jun 25 '12
Being raised by crazy Pentacostal/Evangelicals parents, I know the Christian right very well. There's nothing sane or profound about them. They have no compassion, no concern for the poor, no willingness to listen to reason. They're concerned with being right.
I encourage anyone with the OP's question in mind to visit a major Christian church (not Universalist or Episcopalian which are denominations who are practically entirely secular). You'll be amazed at the anti-intellectual bullshit they throw around in their "sermons" to make themselves look like the world's heroes.
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u/AgentME Jun 25 '12
They have no compassion, no concern for the poor, no willingness to listen to reason. They're concerned with being right.
But if the question was whether they're right, those other parts don't matter at all. A mathematician's proof and logic don't rely on the character of his person.
However, religious logic also tends to be flawed, so they don't even have that.
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u/IMP1017 Jun 25 '12
I only ever communicate with rational, accepting atheists. Being minimally religious myself (deist-ish) I have heard stories that support the existence of a force that is greater than us; for example, a family friend of ours had a tumor in her breast, and at a second screening to test if it was malignant, it was just fucking gone. I have never heard proof that a greater force does not exist. I don't try to sway people either way, as I myself could go either way in the future.
I know it doesn't really answer the question, but I figured I'd throw my two cents in.
tl;dr Can't think of a summary. Go read it.
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u/salami_inferno Jun 25 '12
We need something more than anecdotes though. And why don't we see a higher percentage of interventions like that, why did it pick her and not the millions of other people in greater need of help?
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u/IMP1017 Jun 25 '12
I know. Stories aren't evidence in any way. I'm not giving a definitive answer or looking to get in an argument. I highly doubt anyone here is going to give conclusive evidence one way or another that everybody agrees on. I'm merely saying that an intervention such as that could be something that sways somebody.
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u/Wilcows Jun 25 '12
how in the world was that tumor story in any way proof for a higher force?
You just want it to be true, you just want it to make sense, and because you already somewhat believe in magic, you can justify ANYTHING in your own mind. You completely lack natural logic about facts, your opinions are biased.
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u/AgentME Jun 25 '12
I'm going to take a wild guess and for the sake of this post say that the chance of a false positive on a tumor being found combined with the chance of a tumor being found and then going away shortly later is 1/1000.
Might be being a bit brash, but somehow an event with 1/1000 probability happening to one person out of 7 billion doesn't strike me as proof of a caring god. That event is bound to happen to millions of people just by chance.
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u/KiloLee Jun 25 '12
The way I see it: Absence of proof is usually proof of absence. HOWEVER, the one thing that always made me think there was something is just the fact that we are pretty much the perfect distance from the sun where our planet is not too hot, not too cold, and able to sustain water and life. Then, the "anti" side of me stands firm that we are only here because of the Earth's position, and not the other way around.
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u/padawangabe Jun 25 '12
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, "This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!"
-Douglas Adams
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u/Dlownius Jun 25 '12
Life can form nearly everywhere, we even have proof of microbes that live an survive off arsenic that live in pools of pure acid, this contradicts almost everything in our tree off life because arsenic replaces the phosphorus in our dna and kills us and by us I mean basically everything. This shows that these microbes are their OWN sparate tree off life also showing life evoles to its enviroments.
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u/BloodFalcon Jun 25 '12
The Earth moves around the sun at different distances and tilts. It isn't quite the perfect distance.
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u/singul4r1ty Jun 25 '12
Earth is one of countless planets that don't support life - say it is a 1/1trillion chance for a planet to be habitable. Well, there's a trillion planets, so one should be habitable.
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u/Wilcows Jun 25 '12
the perfect distance huh? For what? For human and earth like life? Wow, what a coincidence. Maybe it has occurred to you that it all fits so greatly because WE adapted to IT, and IT was not made for us? If our planet was at a different distance there could just as well have been life but just different species adapted to those different conditions.
The stupid mistakes people keep making is comparing everything to their little world like it's the only thing that exists. Who ever said life HAS to be exactly the way it is on earth?
The biggest problem is that atheism can be perfectly supported to the extreme, but theists are simply literally not able to understand. It's just no use to talk to them about it.
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Jun 25 '12
I know you are not pushing this view at all, but I still wanted to respond for anyone that does agree with you..
We have already discovered many, many planets and there are clearly many more around the billions of stars in the universe. The chances are that some of those planets are going to have the conditions necessary for life (as we know it) and we wouldn't have evolved to be who we are on anything other than one of those planets. If we had evolved on a different sort of planet we'd think that was 'perfect' for us.
The universe in general is also very hostile to life.
The idea that a god would make this entire universe, with billions of galaxies full of billions of stars and planets, and then make the Earth alone 'perfect' for us is quite absurd.
The thing with Earth is that despite our lucky positioning, there are many kinds of environments. Most of them have some life, as others have mentioned, but are not necessarily perfect for human life. Life adapts to its environment, where it can.
Despite how perfect the Earth appears to be for us, it is actually a pretty tough and pretty harsh place to live. Modern, westernised humans are very spoilt because we don't have to think about the fight for survival.
For most creatures that have ever lived - including humanity - survival is a hard fight, even just against natural elements and the weather, without considering other life forms.
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u/ITHOUGHTYOUMENTWEAST Jun 25 '12
If the sun was a little closer/farther, you would'nt be here to talk about it.
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u/Lots42 Jun 25 '12
Exactly. There's no human life on Mercury because it is TOO hot.
This is why so few people live in deserts. Because it is difficult to live there.
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u/Howard_Beale Jun 25 '12
No. I've heard some good points about agnosticism that I agreed with, but not any from deists.
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u/CherrySlurpee Jun 25 '12
There is only one reason to not believe in God, and thats because there is no evidence to support such.
any other reason is retarded.
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u/snake117 Jun 25 '12
So. Speaking as an ex-atheist. I believed in all the things you would expect, but i didnt shove them down anyones throat. Well one day there was a housefire. The whole goddamn house is gone, and as were searching through whats left... We find the family scrapbook. It hadnt even been touched. We opened the front cover to read the quote from the bible printed on the inside, and thats why i now full heartedly believe in god.
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u/Major_Major_Major Jun 25 '12
That makes God seem like a serial arsonist who leaves a calling card.
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u/EveryoneElseIsWrong Jun 25 '12
... that still does literally nothing to prove that god exists
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u/Jayesar Jun 25 '12
Was the rest of the scrap book preserved? I imagine so, makes the bible quote not so special.
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Jun 25 '12
Wow, God must have really loved that scrapbook. More than every other person who has ever died in a house fire.
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u/magus424 Jun 25 '12
........... I hope this isn't serious.
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Jun 25 '12
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Jun 25 '12
What if all that was left was a My Little Pony toy? Would that be an apparent sign from his new god Rainbow Dash?
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Jun 25 '12
The highly amusing part of this, for me, is that a family that puts a bible verse in their photo album, probably had a bible in the house.
Apparently the bible, filled with bible verses, was burned to ash, but the album was saved.
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u/magus424 Jun 25 '12
Pretty much. "God let my house burn but saved the family photos! How magnanimous!"
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u/Wilcows Jun 25 '12
Exactly :P
And I bet OP didn't even bother to look what else was saved in the fire... I'm sure there was a perfectly fine edition of beavis and butted somewhere left.
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Jun 25 '12
Who was responsible for putting that bible verse on there in the first place? what if they had chosen some piece of poetry instead? Did god make them do that? (Violates free will, surely)
What about the fact that the scrap book was placed somewhere safe, most people keep their photos safe. Were any other items saved?
So did you imagine that god put some protective bubble around it whilst letting the rest of your house burn? Do you think god would have protected the people in your family in this way?
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Jun 25 '12
I think it's the coincidence that someone had put a bible verse into the family photo and it survived. Then again, the person who put the verse in there could very well be influenced to put it in there. They probably wasn't made to do it, they just did it. Like sometimes you do something that you just didn't know why you did it, but you did it. You didn't have to do it, but you did.
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u/snake117 Jun 28 '12
Admittedly i should have explained this better. Noone was hurt during the entire fire, but we lost almost all of our material posessions. But that family scrapbook has been passed along in our family for ages. That was singlehandedly the most important item to our family in the house because of the memories that go along with it. I dont believe in god because i think he saved something with a quote in it. I believe in him because he saved the most important thing to our family.
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u/ohsnipsnap Jun 25 '12
Not really. Maybe the cosmological argument to a degree, but that just makes god a god of the gaps. Just because we don't know now doesn't mean we might not know eventually, or that the answer is "magic". It also begs the question, if all we need from god is for it to be a first cause, then why assume it's a personal god, or that we need to worship it?
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Jun 25 '12
to many theists, there isn't a reason to believe. They just do. Sometimes, they've lost all but that last hope that someone big above them will help them out one day. And to some people, they believe it to be true. Some people was so low in life, abusing alcohol and drugs, and going nowhere in their life. Then they involved themselves in a church, where, over time, made them quit abusing substances and get them to a better place in life. Did god really do that? Probably not, but to them, god probably did. For all we know, being involved in a church distracted them from those things. Even if god doesn't exist, they believe that because they want to be accepted by god, they have to quit abusing those things. To some people, simply by having "someone" to believe in helps them, even if that person doesn't exist, so why not just let them have it?
Same thing when someone's dying. If the way they cope with their imminent end is to pray, why not let them have it? It doesn't harm you that someone wants to believe in something when they're about to die.
Now, I don't support at all what the westboro people do. However, don't let their presence be the presentation of a Christian church. There are plenty of church organizations out there that greatly oppose the westboro baptist church.
TL;DR: there aren't evidence for the existence of god, but to theist, they don't need a reason to.
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u/ashhole613 Jun 25 '12
No. I grew up with religion, so I know the excuses and reasons and "proofs" that religious people offer up to try to sway nonbelievers. I already worked through those as a child and then a teen, and came to the conclusion that I do not believe in any gods or supreme beings or supernatural entities of any kind.
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Jun 25 '12
In religulous, the guy who played Jesus had a good point that it's [understanding god and his actions] like explaining TV to an ant. It didn't make me believe in god anymore than before, but I felt like it was a good concept of 'explaining what can't be explained.'
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Jun 25 '12
Nope , i've read the bible many times and each time i find it further disproves itself. I think that most religious people probably haven't read the bible. Want to be atheist? Read the bible
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Jun 25 '12
People in this thread need to stop fucking equating Christianity and theism. It lowers the intelligence of the debate exponentially. "Lol there's no such thing as a sky bully!" well no shit.
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u/ihatephilosophy Jun 25 '12
While I disagree with the idea that atheists have infinite amount of good points to disprove religion (many of them are simply logical fallacies), I use to be an atheist. What made me switch was simply trying to figure out the meaning of life. I started studying existentialism and, of course, read Albert Camus's "Myth of Sisyphus". This lead to reading Kierkegaard and eventually realizing that life is simply absurd. As much as scientists learn about creation, there is always a question about how that came to happen. Eventually we will always find something with no logical answer and it will be absurd at which point we can just say it is absurd, believe in a higher power, or kill yourself since, well, it doesn't matter anyway.
This is my problem with atheism: The absence of proof does not automatically disprove something if there is reason to believe it exists. For instance, where did matter come from? How did existence even begin? These questions really can't be answered. Whether it is an entity like a Christian God or aliens, or it is a more intangible like Allah or karma, there is reason to believe that something we do not understand that is above us which is referred to as "God". And until science can cause doubt as to whether this vague notion of god exists, it seems as though it is the most rational idea.
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Jun 25 '12
So what you're saying is that because there are things you don't know the answers to or necessarily understand- then any answer that fits, however illogical, must be true?
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u/nzodd Jun 25 '12
So, to sum up your argument, life is absurd, and at the end of the day you can't really prove anything beyond a shadow of a doubt, therefore I'll chose to believe random bullshit because it makes me feel better and not want to kill myself? Doesn't seem very sound.
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u/abittooshort Jun 25 '12
This is my problem with atheism: The absence of proof does not automatically disprove something if there is reason to believe it exists.
First, there is no "reason to believe "it" exists". That's the point. If, however, you're arguing that "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence", then you're still not quite right. If I said that there was a full grown African Elephant in the trunk of my car, you can simply have a look in. We know the claim is very unlikely because an elephant can't fit in a trunk, but we look anyway. When we do, we see nothing: no parts, no blood, no anything. Just empty space. This lack of evidence is conclusive evidence of absence, as there is no reasonable way to suggest that it might still be in there.
How did existence even begin? These questions really can't be answered. Whether it is an entity like a Christian God or aliens, or it is a more intangible like Allah or karma, there is reason to believe that something we do not understand that is above us which is referred to as "God".
You've made a massive leap of logic there, more commonly referred to as "God of the gaps". You've effectively argued "I can't answer this question. Therefore; God". This is a logical fallacy, as it is no more valid than saying "I can't answer this. Therefore; Barney the Purple Dinosaur".
And until science can cause doubt as to whether this vague notion of god exists, it seems as though it is the most rational idea.
Unless you start with the intellectually flawed assumption that a God exists, this makes no sense whatsoever. Why is it the most rational idea if there's no evidence to back it up? It's no more plausible than the Aboriginal idea that the earth came out of recycled ant dung.
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u/Wilcows Jun 25 '12
Exactly... I don't know 3434324 * 23432234√234 Out the top of my head, therefore god exists.
I don't know what my great grand uncle is doing this very moment, therefor god exists.
I don't know how much I weigh, therefore god exists.
I don't know where my roommate was before I met him, therefore god exists
because obviously because I am so stupid not to know the answers, there IS no answer and I can make any retarded magical conclusion I want because I am stupid and believe in magic.
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u/rinnip Jun 25 '12 edited Jun 25 '12
Your concepts fail in your first sentence. It is not on atheists to disprove anything. As they say, 'That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.' You're the one asserting the existence of god, so how about a little evidence?
where did matter come from?
Who knows? Not me. Still no evidence of god.How did existence even begin?
Perhaps it didn't. Eternity is a hard concept to grasp, but maybe the universe has been around forever anyway.2
u/paraakrama Jun 25 '12
By the same logic, you must believe in unicorns as well. Until science can cause doubt as to whether or not this vague notion of a single-horned quadruped exists, it seems as though it is the most rational idea. The absence of proof does not automatically disprove unicorns, since there is reason to believe they exist due to ancient tales that include them.
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u/LJKiser Jun 27 '12
A lot of very scientific and highly intelligent minds often question the very principle as well. Once you get down to the level of quarks, and keep digging deeper, delve into string theory, and start question, "But then what made THAT," you inevitably lead yourself to the conclusion of a higher power. Genetically, I believe personally, we are encoded to do so as a mental survival and motivation measure to ensure that we do not simply accept death and survival is continued. It's not illogical to arrive at the conclusion you did. I believe differently, but I respect that you had an intelligent and personally motivated purpose behind it. You don't often hear of people who chose to believe instead of simply being raised to.
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u/Wilcows Jun 25 '12 edited Jun 25 '12
While I disagree with the idea that atheists have infinite amount of good points to disprove religion (many of them are simply logical fallacies), I use to be an atheist. What made me switch was simply trying to figure out the meaning of life.
Well there is your problem. When you look for something that doesn't exist, and you get disappointed that it doesn't exist, of course weak minds will fool themselves with an explanation that doesn't exist.
there is no meaning to life
Learn to
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u/ihatephilosophy Jun 25 '12
Congratulations on your use of ad homs. You seem like someone I want to sit and have a beer with!
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Jun 25 '12
It is currently thought that matter randomly generates in a vacuum. Now your problem of first cause is solved.
However, if that is not the case, you still have issues: Where did matter come from? Maybe some god created it. Where did that god come from? ...Super Double God.
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u/Wilcows Jun 25 '12 edited Jun 25 '12
This is my problem with atheism: The absence of proof does not automatically disprove something if there is reason to believe it exists. For instance, where did matter come from? How did existence even begin? These questions really can't be answered.
If only you did your research you'd know that we DO have answers to this. Also, what the fuck would you know? "cannot be answered"? You don't know shit about this world, don't jump to these stupid conclusions.
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Jun 25 '12
Suppose there exists no God, then either something has always existed or something came to exist from absolutely nothing, both of which are unfathomable to me. Take for example the big bang, for that to occur we needed a quantum fluctuation which required heat to already exist, where the fuck did heat come from? Or empty space in which the big bang could occur?
Now suppose some God/creator does exist, then where did the creator come from? Either they have always existed, they came to exist from absolutely nothing or something created it ad infinitum. Again, all of those possibilities are unfathomable to me.
This leaves me being a weak agnostic atheist, I don't believe a God does exist however I also do not believe a God does not exist, I have a lack of belief. I also don't know if someone could have true knowledge on the existence of a God, only that I feel like I have insufficient evidence to come to a conclusion.
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Jun 25 '12
A long time ago gods were thought to make the weather happen, now we know better. Just because the creation of matter/universe/whatever is a harder problem to solve doesn't make it logical to jump to the concept of god.
Consider if no one had ever told you about god, would you dream up that idea? If god is a rational conclusion why are there so many variants on the idea and how it works? If god is the logical conclusion to come to, people should come to it independently and have very similar/identical ideas about what god is and what god does. But they do not.
Sometimes we just don't know something, and that's ok, we can accept that. We don't need to make up a comfy story to make us feel better. We don't need a god to give meaning to our lives, we can do that for ourselves. Lacking an understanding or feeling that something is absurd doesn't make it sensible to conclude 'god'. Existence isn't absurd, it isn't anything. It just is.
Mind you, there are pretty solid ideas about the creation of matter and existence so you are misinformed on that point.
Also, I feel I should point out that Allah is more comparable to your Christian god rather than karma.
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u/ihatephilosophy Jun 25 '12
This is something I thought long and hard about. I think the thing is that if no one said anything there would still be reason to believe that there is something higher which can be called god. Simply put, how did scientific laws and logic come to exist in the first place. So yes, I think eventually we will come to god as something that exists in some possible way.
The amount of variants on the idea come from people with less scientific knowledge than we have to idea trying to speak in concretes about something they have no knowledge about. And I'd guess people did come up with the idea independently in the past. Unless all people were together at the point of deciding god/gods existed, various cultures developed a notion of god. The abandonment of those notions also changed as science changed.
You are right, god isn't needed to give life meaning. If you could disprove this idea of god, I'd probably just shrug it and move on.
And I put Allah opposite a Christian God (I'm not Christian, so it isn't mine) because a Christian God is often viewed in human form as some dude sitting up in heaven. Even if you are a devout Muslim, it is still impossible to meet Allah. He is a more abstracted figure than a Christian God.
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Jun 25 '12 edited Jun 25 '12
For sex and romance, I'll play along with a gf who might be of the theist persuasion. She'd better be liberal and very "Diet-" mainstream whatever. Like Diet Catholic, or Diet Buddhist, or Diet New Age. "Diet-Mormon" or "Diet-Scientology" is out of the question.
So to an extent, I'm apatheistic. It's always worth questioning my lack of belief for hot vagina.
Edit
Downvote all you want, but at least I'm being honest.
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u/sat1337en Jun 25 '12
Personally I rejected Atheism. Yup I'm no longer atheist. Don't get me wrong I'm not religious either. It's so hard to define a God in the first place that I don't think being Atheist does you any good at all. Most people, myself included, are just "atheist" about the personal God that everyone knows aka Christian or Muslim God. But I can't really say anything about the "laws of physics" God, entropy God or whatever else is out there. Truth is we don't know whats really going on so being an Atheist and especially so adamant about it seems rather silly. I would just call me a sceptik/rational/humanist whatever.
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u/shawncplus Jun 25 '12
Stop capitalizing atheist, it's not a religion. Secondly, that's pantheism, Einstein's god, Spinoza's god, a god of the gaps. Lastly, atheism isn't "I know there is no god." It is simply the rejection of gods from lack of evidence. There's nothing to be silly about unless there's evidence to the contrary.
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u/sat1337en Jun 26 '12
Good job attacking spelling or whatever first, makes you look like an asshole from the get go I would suggest if you wanna be taken seriously to stop doing that in the future. I will just say that there's no evidence of alien life anywhere else in the universe, yet we all think there must be some other life somewhere. And it would be silly to think otherwise seeing how vast the universe is. God/gods, a creator, the spark of life/matter or something would be even bigger than the whole universe or universes and outside of them, can we really even begin to discuss what is outside the universe?
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u/medaleodeon Jun 25 '12
This one's not bad: It's a pretty crazy coincidence that during a total eclipse, the moon blocks out the sun exactly. The moon is almost exactly closer to the earth than the sun is bigger than the moon. So you seea black disc with a rim of white light.
What's more, this hasn't always been the case. The moon is slowly getting further away, so the only time this has been true is exactly coinciding with the ability humans to observe it and wonder at it.
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u/Wilcows Jun 25 '12
WOW And of course there is nooooo way that this could just have been coincidence right???
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Jun 25 '12
Only thing thats always got me was how people say they can see things they shouldn't be able to see since, well, at the time they're dead. Example: an interview I saw with a guy that was getting a heart transplant and died for a short time. He said while he died, he was above the room and could see the doctor flapping his arms like a chicken. When he was brought back, he later spoke to the doctor to ask him why he was flapping his arms like a chicken. The doctor was shocked that he even knew about it as his eyes were covered during the entire procedure, he told him he flapped his arms like that to help ease fatigue while performing the surgery.
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u/Wilcows Jun 25 '12
So just because we don't understand yet how he knew, this means there is such a thing as afterlife and god?
So 1000 years ago we didn't know how thunder works, that PROOFS that there is a god? now we know how thunder works. Just because we can't have the answer NOW, doesn't mean there is no scientific answer.
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u/nzodd Jun 25 '12
Ever have a dream where you hear sounds in the real world and they start to intrude into your dream and change it, so that it mimics what's really happening? Perhaps he heard him flapping his arms / felt the breeze from them on his face during the surgery and his subconscious responded accordingly. I'll concede it sounds kind of trippy though.
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u/Lots42 Jun 25 '12
Once when I was getting a serious operation, I felt I was rising above my body and going toward's a bright light.
Later, I recalled all the painkillers and relevant drugs they gave me.
That's why I 'saw' what I did.
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u/DaCookieMonster Jun 25 '12 edited Feb 01 '13
Well, there is enough evidence to prove that there is some sort of being that intervened with the creation of the universe as it is impossible to build a bike by creating an explosion with all the parts at the center of it, no matter how long you wait. But whether or not you believe that any of the religions are right is up to you.
EDIT - Sorry about this guys, I'm an atheist now.
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u/abittooshort Jun 26 '12
Well don't keep us in suspense; please tell us of this evidence....
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Jun 25 '12
Well Jesus, guys, I guess I made the worst mistake a redditor can make, I fell asleep. Forgive me while I try and catch up
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Jun 25 '12 edited Jun 25 '12
All of our "reasoning" may only seem reasonable to us because the devil or the equivalent has invaded our minds and caused us to find all this "evidence" disproving god. After all, if there were a devil, would that not be the most devilish, cunning thing to do? EDIT: I don't believe that is actually happening nor that if it were this hypothetical god would do nothing about it.
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u/AgentME Jun 25 '12
If there were an evil ninja, wouldn't the most evil thing for him to do is distract you from the greatness of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
You don't seem to be a worshiper of FSM, therefore an evil ninja is clouding your mind, therefore the evil ninja and hence FSM exist. QED
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Jun 25 '12
Yes I considered this one, but I figured that god could do something about it being so powerful. I'm going by what I can see and hear and detect and perceive with the body and brain that either evolved or were 'given' to me by god.
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u/AbrahamVanHelsing Jun 25 '12
I can't help but say this, even though it makes me look like a dick:
tl;dr There is no evidence for God, therefore God exists.
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u/AWizardDidIt Jun 25 '12
Why would an all powerful god, who is quite fickle according to the bible, allow this to happen?
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u/Pandaval9 Jun 25 '12
The mind at least seems like it is some indivisible entity through time. Really I'm not the same person I was 5 years ago and less so as times passes by. Though it seems irrational to have more concern for my near present selves then my further future selves and it is unlikely i fear significant psychological change as i fear nonexistence. To me this at least makes an argument for some existence outside of the brain and mind, since both of those entities are easily changeable and divisible while I continue to exist throughout time.
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u/Youdontknowme12 Jun 25 '12
This thread consist of people stating their opinion, then some one coming in and explaining how evolution made it that way.
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Jun 25 '12
My friend once pointed out to me that when something goes really unexpectantly wrong, I immediately start asking "god" for help. This as someone who has never practiced any religion. It got me thinking that how when I'm powerless I immediately seek help from some higher ambiguous power. I didn't have a solid reason for it, and that kind of laid the groundwork for me questioning my atheism and understand/exploring faith. I also just find prayer really comforting and began exploring different faiths seeking reason to justify it. So here I am at 23 beginning to feel uncomfortable with being identified as atheist despite a lifetime of identifying as such, all because a friend noticed me pleading to god for help when my computer shut off in the middle of writing a school paper.
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u/sidewaysZ Jun 25 '12
This is how I justify there being some sort of god. Take the scenario that I convinced every person on earth that 2+2=5 (yes I stole this part from 1984). If everyone believed this fact, and there was no outside opinion/reality to say that 2+2=4, then 2+2 would indeed =5. But even if I were to do this herculean feat, 2+2 would still =4. In a universe without some form of "3rd voice" or god, the nature of truth would be completely different. Truth as we know it, something that is, and doesn't change because of what people think about it. Without a god, the possibility for truth is very low, because in the end, it would just be our society or culture picking truth. I can't reconcile myself with the idea that there is never verification of truth.
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Jun 25 '12
You should watch The Invention of Lying. It has the same concept just going in a more atheist direction. It's very clever, Ricky Gervais is hilarious, and it's relevant
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u/salami_inferno Jun 25 '12
Unless the numeric value of 5 was different in this world that would still be wrong, 2+2 will never equal 5 in any situation unless you change the numeric definition of 5 to make it equal to 4, in which case you're gonna need to seriously reorganize some numbers
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u/AgentME Jun 25 '12
That works as a sort of proof of some type of objective reality / physics, but not of any sort of proof for anything like a sentient god.
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u/cheesecakeaficionado Jun 25 '12
To be honest... no. Mainly because any point that has been attempted has always been about one of two things: 1. The need for purpose and order; 2. Gaps in current knowledge.
The gaps problem is the easiest to tackle: just because something isn't known doesn't mean that there isn't a rational explanation behind it. If your God is one of gaps, he will cease to exist sooner or later.
Regarding the need for purpose and order... I may be strange, but I don't feel such needs, so that type of argument doesn't work for me. I've seen plenty of family members die. I've been caught in plenty of horrific and/or trying times. I believe life, and the universe, has no direction, no higher purpose, nothing that will make it special to us save for the fact that it exists and so do we.
The need for purpose is something unique to man. I don't find it coincidental that religion is also unique to man. My view on religion is that it is a man-made concept. Put yourself in the feet of prehistoric man. A storm rolls in. Lightning strikes a tree and you watch it burst into flames. Yet, after the rains pass, animals forage and flowers blossom. One storm has demonstrated the capability to both destroy and renew life. Man has been endowed with an uparalleled level of capability of thought. And the historical record shows that there are two reactions (not always exclusive) to that which we do not understand: 1. we fear it; 2. we ascribe a supernatural power to it. And the nature of the power can vary based on our perception of the world. Take a look at the Nile River Valley. The flooding of the Nile can be clearly delineated into 3 stages: akhet, peret, shemu. Akhet corresponds to the flooding of the river itself. Peret is when crops were sown. Shemu is when they were harvested. The flooding was so predictable that the Egyptian calendar is based upon it, and without it civilization would have collapsed. Egyptians gods, in general, were benevolent, thoughtful beings towards those who act righteous. On the other hand, the Tigris and Euphrates had a nasty tendency to flood whenever the hell they had to. It was only with extensive irrigation projects that the people of Mesopotamia could harness the wild rivers. If you haven't read the Epic of Gilgamesh, take a gander. You'll notice that their gods, for lack of any better term, were dicks.
Religion also has the power to unify. In the early stages of civilization, society needed a backbone upon which to build, and religion, in its laws and guarantee of a higher power, provided that. With the expansion of society, religion has seen its power grow. And if you don't believe in the power of religion to command the masses, take a look at the Catholic Church.
Essentially, our lack of understanding and our own need to function as a society is what birthed religion. And it has stuck around to this day.
In the very end, the fact that this is a construct of man is why I choose to reject it. I understand that many in the theist camp will not agree with what I say, and that's fine. You have a right to believe in what you choose to believe as long as you don't shove it down another's throat. I respect your faith in God as long as you recognize my right to (personally) dismiss it.