If anything you were not ridiculous enough.



It should be more.


believing an omniscient creator exists separately from the universe and somehow created it from "nothing" specifically so intelligent life would emerge to serve and worship him then he impregnated a human women with himslef and yada yada yada.

You repeated the same thing he said originally, except for dropping in the immaculate conception.

It all begins there, really. Christ rose from the dead, or he didn't.

Or it doesn't.

We also have the ridiculously absurd macrocosmic context that self-conscious beings find themselves in. One could start and end there too, and find themselves a theist (or deist).

There's more than one way to get there.

You could follow the philosophical trail or seriously consider the historical person of Christ, but how you could become an atheist without having experienced a seriously f***** up life... I. have. no. idea.

And maybe my personal experiences in life rule me out and exclude me from objective consideration of these matters (I'm sure they do, in fact), but still, I stand by my faith. We have the miraculous on our side, as well as the mysterious. We have Christ, and we have the cosmic dilemmas and paradoxes.

That is more than enough! It is more than is needed.

Re-evaluate your game. Make the necessary adjustments.



edit: Then again, maybe it is those who have never confronted evil head on who are more likely to not believe in evil, the devil, or God.

But... maybe the tower of Siloam falls no matter who is up there on it, like Christ suggested.

But nah. I don't buy that, now that I think on it. They say that only the good die young. But where are all of these good people? Did they all die young?!

I... am going to stop typing now.

A

B

There's a certain irony here given the tales you sometimes post here that give the impression you're life has been pretty f***ed up. Mine has been pretty straightforward and yet I've turned out to be a heathen atheist.....go figure.

This might help understand the issue from both sides of the argument.

No i added serve and worship and yada yada too.


Every answer is a bit ridiculous. Best not to guess without more info.

My life hasn't been as bad as yours but to it hasn't always been a bed of roses.

Can anybody forget about the whole Christian thing for a moment and answer these questions? Thanks

Thanks for taking my questions seriously without trying to be sarcastic. I will watch this video.

It has been answered.

What you are describing is not an explanation for the creation of the universe. The big bang is a physics theory providing timeline from a very early point (after the plank epoch) in the universe's history. Later observations and measurements have supported this theory.

It becomes impossible to answer your "dilemma" when you are unable to pose it correctly, and when corrected ignore this and merely repeat yourself.

Just read "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins.
He addresses these questions.... exhaustively (and well).

Science can never answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Naturalism deals with nature, nature will always be contingent, contingency always requires a cause, which can never be natural. That's why science is largely irrelevant to anything of eternal importance.

So the ultimate cause which itself has no cause is either personal or impersonal. That's the real issue.

Presumption.

Naturalism != science

Heisenberg would disagree.

Tautology.

Taxonomy.

And largely important to anything of eternal irrelevance?

You are merely affirming the paradigm of your belief system.

(I'm sorry for this, but since you have stated I can't use naturalism I have to resort to postmodernism).

"the answer is why not?" -Sean Carroll

Also the hypothesis "God exists" does not answer the question of why there is God instead of nothing (ontological argument BS aside).

How does a supernatural being existing before this make any more sense? Basically, what created God? Why does god get a free pass on the inexplicable but everything else must mathematically add up for you? Your answer cannot be "because he's god, duh". If you cant accept that the universe spontaneously exploded out of nothingness, then I cant accept the same answer for God. There has to be like a super god or something, but then who created god^2? And the god before that? And before him? Etc.

A machine is designed the be as efficient as possible and to include as many features as possible given the task. A car engine built for speed, an airplane built for flight, a microprocessor built for computing things. Obvious design decisions are made in a logical order to achieve a goal in the most optimal way possible. Now look at the human body, the design is a total mess. Blood vessels everywhere, some too big, some too small, numerous inadequacies and shortcomings. As a species we are incredibly weak. We cant fly, we cant run very fast, we cant climb very well, we have sensitive diets, we are incredibly fragile, we cant defend ourselves well against predators, we dont see well in the dark or the light, we cant shoot laser beams from our eyes, etc. The only thing we have to our advantage is our brain, of which we only use something like 10% of, and which is so slow to learn it requires parental guidance for the first quarter of our lives or so, and to which has still not yet enabled us to learn how to exist without destroying our habitat and each other in the process. Quite simply, we are dumb.

If man were created by an intelligent being, I would think he'd be borderline ******ed. We are a terrible biological design. When you look at a diagram of the human form we are a complete hodgepodge mess of goo. We are extremely inefficient at everything and have almost no beneficial traits to aid in our existence. How you can sit there and marvel at the cardiovascular system as if it some impressive design that couldnt be solved in a more effective manner is beyond me. Man himself is probably only a few short decades away from designing a fully autonomous bipedal robot to simulate human range of motion without any of the shortcomings. I.E. we can create a being better than ourselves. What does that tell you about god?

Does answering B. "Maybe there's something else going on here.", necessitate conscious intention? If so, it's not a legitimately posed question.

The problem with answer B that a lot of religious people misunderstand is that simply chumming the entire existence of the universe into a simplistic "there's something else going on here" actually creates even more questions and requires even more information to explain the phenomena we call reality. All too often I see some bible thumper pull a gotcha and say "I thought the most simplest of answers are usually the best one's". But God is not a simple answer. It's infinitely more complex than every single moment that has occurred since the big bang.

You might as well say the light turns on in your house when you flip the switch because of God, and not actually try to understand the fundamentals of electricity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_brain_myth

It isn't that hard.

1) The universe is all big and stuff. Doesn't make sense that it just poofed into existence.

2) Obviously the universe had to have come from something. We can call that thing the universe creator. The universe creator had to have been pretty awesome to be able to create the universe. Doesn't make sense that such a being poofed into existence.

3) Obviously the universe creator had to come from something. We can call that thing the universe creator creator. The universe creator creator had to have been pretty awesome to be able to create a universe creator. Doesn't make sense that such a being poofed into existence.

4) Wash, rinse, repeat.

What takes faith is believing that you know the nature of such things. What takes nearly no faith is believing that those who say they have knowledge of such things (and specifically why the universe creator decided to make the universe) are talking out of their ass.

You were taught of a creator at the same time you were taught about Santa Claus. You believed in them both equally the same. Imagine if your parents never told you Santa wasnt real.

There's a reason religion is taught during childhood, because you can tell a child anything and he/she will believe it. This is called indoctrination. It is the staple point of every single religion on earth.

i think both a and bare leaps of faith

i hate how the people who believe A smugly judge those who believe b

It cuts both ways

Do you agree that the universe had a beginning?

Well, people who believe A are idiots, so what do you expect? Nothing does not explode. An explosion is a distinct physical phenomena that is explained with something.

This, for the record, would be nothing as in the theoretical (and possibly philosophical) "absence of everything". It is not a phenomena we know and nor is it a phenomena which is possible to observe. A vacuum does not even come close to qualify.

They do this because the people from group B try to control the lives of group A. If they would just mind their own business nobody would act smugly towards them.

Cough.

So, you act smugly toward people who try to control your life?

I don't think so. You usually act smugly when you are in control, or when you believe you will soon have control of other people's lives.