After watching a lot of Richard Dawkins lectures and documentaries, I am wondering...If you truly have understood the evidence that science "so far" have laid on the table can you still believe in God?
I mean, claim that Jesus was born from a virgin mother and all that. There is a place called Heaven where your eternal soul will rest next to all other ppl that died allready (must be a pretty big place actaually).
And another thing (think I have said this before)
I always wondered where "God" was in the ancient world...or even before that. Was he hiding in Valhalla or behind the throne of Jupiter or did Horus and Anubis have him shacked up in the after life?.
Why did he decide to pop in to existence all of a sudden...or did man simply sack the old God's because it was to tedious to pray to them all? .
Or hey...maybe he "evolved", then Darwin was right all the time
in Religulous it said 93% of US scientists are atheist. so, i guess the other percentage are just brainwashed in that AREA, or they just WANT to believe it (better life after death).
in west religion is pretty much biased in the way the majority of childen who grow up have to read bible, go to churches, pray - in other words their parents force it to them.
muslim countries are built up on religious ideology, so i imagine it's hard to not live there other way:p
i dont believe in god, though i support the idea behind spiritual life. lucid dreaming - the most known form of it
I mean, claim that Jesus was born from a virgin mother and all that. There is a place called Heaven where your eternal soul will rest next to all other ppl that died allready (must be a pretty big place actaually).
i'm not saying there is a god, but the fact that there might be one doesn't imply that the whole jesus business is true, nor the existence of heaven or the immortality of the soul. or even the existence of the soul.
In fact 'scientists' who believe in god (as in the popular religions) are quite often used to lend weight to the arguments made by religious people. Terms such as 'reconcile' and 'realisation' are thrown about but I sincerely doubt the people who say those things are being honest towards the world or even to themselves.
The whole belief system assumes acceptance without proof which goes against any scientific method. Most religions require (demand) that you accept their god as the only true god and all the events (past and future) related to the gods/messiahs are to be taken as being facts.
I think it's all fear-driven and in a sense it is like buying insurance. Nobody wants to fall sick or total their car but it's nice to have insurance in case it happens. Similarly, religion is just fulfilling peoples need to silence that eternal question 'what if'.
I find the god picture has changed dramatically with the expansion of scientific breakthroughs. Still I choose to believe that somehow something must have unleashed Big Bang, maybe that was god, maybe it was coincidence, who knows.
Or maybe that's just how things work...naturally. I think we as humans "need" an explanation for the unexplained. What is better then to put this "force" in charge and sweep the rest under the carpet.
There, it's all divine glory, case closed.
If one choose to call that "natural" force God...so be it.
The truth is
We can with 99% certainty say that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, life started pretty fast after that (bacteria) Then it took along long time for more complex life to evolve. There have been 5 major extinction events in Earths history. The biggest extinction event was the The Permian-Triassic where 96% of all life was viped of the planet.
By chance a little branch of life survived that was to become the mammals, a branch from where we origin.
Now, I can not in my wildest dreams see that all that was guided by some entity that claims to have made Humans in is image and created the world in 7 days etc. Actually a entity that sprang to life only in the last micro second in Earth's long history...what took him so long i wonder?.
Now, I can not in my wildest dreams see that all that was guided by some entity that claims to have made Humans in is image and created the world in 7 days etc. Actually a entity that sprang to life only in the last micro second in Earth's long history...what took him so long i wonder?.
why does the christian concept of god keep coming up?
i suggest thinking about god as some sort of imaterial entity that created everything, or perhaps something even more generic, and dropping the whole in creation in 7 days and all the rest of that crap. the christian god or the gods pictured in most religions are just silly and it's not very hard to make fun of them. pick on some less childish ideas about god, it should prove more of a challenge
i'm a molecular biologist myself, me and my colleagues are the worst atheists/blasphemers there are. you just can't do this kind of research (especially genetics/development biology) while being religious.
but i would say it depends on your field of research. as long as you're not into something that is "copyrighted" by god according to the bible, it doesn't really make a difference if you believe in the old geezer up there
I think Bill Hicks got it right.
My favourite video of him:
give this a shot:
you'll find it all on youtube. this has nothing to do with the current topic, but whatever.
plot:A recovering Robitussin addict strives to become a ninja and regain his girlfriend through training with his master and tripping on mushrooms.
they shot this over the course of ten years
I don't believe what's in the bible/torah/quran 100%, it's all a bunch of bullshit.
That being said, I'd still consider myself agnostic as opposed to atheist.
Same.
Another reason for religion/God is that people are just looking to have a purpose in life and cant find it otherwise or in other things/ideas/communites.
That being said, im more interested in science put up against some ideas of buddhism. Though thou shall not thread steal
"Zipfero is the biggest fucking golddigger ever" - Mutantius
Swingman has it right that religion is like car insurance. However I would like to point out that with religion its much more unlikely to ever pay up. How many religions are there? How many god's? Theists may as well just make a giant wheel and have a spin at it when choosing what to follow.
Religions even modern ones give some pretty outrageous fairy tales. But lets say that one of them is correct which one would it be? This would still leave a giant list of religions to follow and each and everyone of them has the same chances of being right as none of them has ever provided any evidence.
What we normally see with religions trying to "prove" they are right is normally based on people who say they "feel" god or they like to point out "miracles" that happened to them or someone of the same religion. The problem is this "feeling" isn't just native to their religion as I have heard it from many. The "miracles" or either made up or rationally explained and even then reports of "miracles" happens all over the world to all different religions and from the past to the present.
The belief in something with out any form of evidence is a foolish thing no matter what the subject is. I'm not saying people shouldn't be open to possibility but one has to remain rational and skeptical. If I made a extraordinary claim that I was abducted by aliens would you outright believe me? I sure hope not. So why should anyone believe in religion which is perhaps even more outrageous of a claim.
Well the thing is you cannot prove the existence of higher entity, as well as you can't prove there isn't one. Spirituality is something you cannot put into equation and say: well the equation says there is 74+-10 % chance that there is one There is so much things on earth and in universe that we (or modern science) don't know or don't understand.
Even our brain is a mystery, and what kind of mystery it is! You don't know why you dream, there is only speculation. You don't know why people have lucid dreams. We don't know a great things about it, how it works, or why it work the way it does.
And science is a tricky thing. You can find a theory which can basically prove all you want at one given time (e.g. before heliocentric system people thought that Earth is in the center of universe, until they found the means to prove it is, in fact, orbiting around the Sun). Look at the string field theory, it perfectly explains the coupling of four great forces (electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear and gravitational), yet it is (and until we build "super LHC") not proven experimentally.
I tend to think that we are evolving as we are learning about ourselves and our surroundings. Thus we advance in all aspects of life. What lies 'beyond' is a mystery that, probably, keeps the people going on. You can look at the world and say: there is so many death, people are killing other people (which is only specific to our kind, there isn't a single proof of other animals doing the same), there is poverty, famine. But there is also a good side of life. When you are in love, when you look around you and see the beautiful environment that is given for us to use and to enjoy.
Don't let some books decide what you will believe. Take many sides, and then carefully wage what makes sense to you.
"Quantum mechanics is actually, contrary to it's reputation, unbeliveably simple, once you take the physics out."
Scott Aaronson
chiv wrote:
thats true you know. newton didnt discover gravity. the apple told him about it, and then he killed it. the core was never found.
we had a major thread about the existence of god a year or so ago, that being said, I will say this once again, I have a certitude that god does not exist, not because it is impossible for something like god to be real, but because every single god definition mentioned by humans are nothing more than historical figures designed to explained the then unexplained, and as mentioned above the notion of god evolved to the religions we have nowadays, as for the creation of the universe, that is subject for a lot of discussion, does it really help to put a god in the equation and say, "we really have no clue how this all started, let's put a god here at the beginning and go from there", I don't think that helps in any way, I've entered in many discussions about god only to find people struggling to insert god in whatever branch of newly acquired knowledge humans discovered, we don't even know if the big bang really existed, remember this, every information we have about the cosmos was "discovered" within this solar system, with probes no far than Jupiter, and 90% of the observations are Earth based, I mention this because, we live on a planet. going considerable close to a star, that is orbited by billions of tons of debris and gas, and this star is just a small body in a structure known as our galaxy that is composed by another 400 billion stars, millions of black holes, including a really supermassive one, billions and billions of tons of gas and stuff that we can't even see, and all the information we take as granted was gathered in this tiny planet, even with adaptive opicts and super powerful telescopes, there is way to much stuff on our path of vision to even think about making a conclusion, our current cosmological science is pretty much like trying to make figure of a movie being played in a giant screen when we were a single random pixel within the screen.
where I want to get at is, even if we are unable to understand something, we can't made up some heart warming story just to justify our incapability to comprehend it, the truth is, we might as well never know the real truth about the size, birth or eternal live of or universe, we sure as hell shouldn't stop trying to find out, but just because we discovered so many things doesn't mean we will discover everything, but god isn't neither the answer or the solution, god is a primitive notion that is keeping mankind of advancing further.
He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither
- Benjamin Franklin - 1759
Religion is a relic from the past when there was no unbiased flow of information or no information at all and no other way of explaining lightning other than it's God farting, people believed what the powers in charge told them for reasons that they didn't know better themselves, again no scientific discoveries that could explain certain things, and to bring a certain order into chaos (if you believe that if you pay taxes and behave nice like thou shall not kill, and that you will get into heaven that way, there is a good chance you will do do exactly that).
Why do we have it today? For the same reasons really, some parts of the world are still incredibly stupid and poor and uneducated people in particular still tend to believe that lighting means God is farting in anger and that the earth is flat, yes there are smart people that know the ways of science but still follow a certain cult excuse me modern religion because their grandmother used to beat them and forced them into church or because of church class in high school.
Now that I've said every religion out there is bullshit, except Buddhism it rocks!, if God means creator it is entirely plausible that we have one, imagine a group of aliens on a high school trip on a blue watery planet and one of them needs to go to the bathroom, he pees into the ocean and somehow he leaves his DNA out there and that's the first sign of life on our planet from which all other life forms formed, that would mean this pimple nosed slimy little brat is our God and that he is dead for billions of years, hura! So I see no reason why scientists wouldn't believe in God, but will they follow any of today's cults excuse me religions well that is less likely imo.
does it really help to put a god in the equation and say, "we really have no clue how this all started, let's put a god here at the beginning and go from there"
Ironically that's what Deus ex machina is, a classic form of play in ancient Rome where a god would be lowered onto the stage with ropes to "fix" the mess of the different story lines going on in the play.
Religion is a relic from the past when there was no unbiased flow of information or no information at all and no other way of explaining lightning other than it's God farting, people believed what the powers in charge told them for reasons that they didn't know better themselves, again no scientific discoveries that could explain certain things, and to bring a certain order into chaos (if you believe that if you pay taxes and behave nice like thou shall not kill, and that you will get into heaven that way, there is a good chance you will do do exactly that).
Why do we have it today? For the same reasons really, some parts of the world are still incredibly stupid and poor and uneducated people in particular still tend to believe that lighting means God is farting in anger and that the earth is flat, yes there are smart people that know the ways of science but still follow a certain cult excuse me modern religion because their grandmother used to beat them and forced them into church or because of church class in high school.
Now that I've said every religion out there is bullshit, except Buddhism it rocks!, if God means creator it is entirely plausible that we have one, imagine a group of aliens on a high school trip on a blue watery planet and one of them needs to go to the bathroom, he pees into the ocean and somehow he leaves his DNA out there and that's the first sign of life on our planet from which all other life forms formed, that would mean this pimple nosed slimy little brat is our God and that he is dead for billions of years, hura! So I see no reason why scientists wouldn't believe in God, but will they follow any of today's cults excuse me religions well that is less likely imo.
you are talking about god as a ethics teacher and a Earth life creator, but ultimately the true notion of god is the creator of all things in existence, so your aliens would also had to be created by it, some people say that life on this planet was created by some alien civilization and that they created the main religions to guide us morally, but that is just another forceful attempt trying to make god fit in, even if that could be somehow true, it has noting to do with the traditional creator of all things that many people so strongly believe.
Religion can be abused, that stands. But the notion that there is something to live for isn't bad. The thinking that there could be something bigger than us doesn't need to imply that it will keep us from advancing. You doesn't need to be atheistic to be scientist, that is preposterous. You just mustn't be fanatic. To believe in something doesn't mean you can't do your studies... So the real answer to the question is: You don't need to be atheist to be scientist. I don't think that atheists are bad persons or anything, just to be clear, I'm agnostic btw...
"Quantum mechanics is actually, contrary to it's reputation, unbeliveably simple, once you take the physics out."
Scott Aaronson
chiv wrote:
thats true you know. newton didnt discover gravity. the apple told him about it, and then he killed it. the core was never found.
you are talking about god as a ethics teacher and a Earth life creator, but ultimately the true notion of god is the creator of all things in existence, so your aliens would also had to be created by it, some people say that life on this planet was created by some alien civilization and that they created the main religions to guide us morally, but that is just another forceful attempt trying to make god fit in, even if that could be somehow true, it has noting to do with the traditional creator of all things that many people so strongly believe.
Well if that God created everything and the universe as well who created him? No let me guess he lived forever or better yet he created himself before he even existed those religious cots get so ticked off about "well who created this and that if you don't believe in God" but again they never question who created their God did he have a father and mother God, doesn't make sense, if everything is created by somebody than I'd like to hear them explain who created their God.
..our current cosmological science is pretty much like trying to make figure of a movie being played in a giant screen when we were a single random pixel within the screen.
Nice example! But that's where science accepts its limitations and religion limits people into acceptance.
And it is not like we live in the dark ages where scientific discoveries were either censured or the domain of a previleged few. We may not understand the intricacies and the maths involved but in general terms, we know what the scientists know.
Knowledge alone is no barrier to religion because scientists are human too and subject to the same pressures as the rest of us. Society exerts varying degrees of pressure on people which forces certain beliefs onto them. It takes a lot of strength to take a stand and renounce the membership of a club one was born into with all the consequences of taking such a step.
For me personally, 'eternal damnation for my soul' was nothing compared to seeing the look of disappointment on my mother's face when I told her I wouldn't be renewing this insurance policy for my soul.
Well the thing is you cannot prove the existence of higher entity, as well as you can't prove there isn't one. Spirituality is something you cannot put into equation and say: well the equation says there is 74+-10 % chance that there is one There is so much things on earth and in universe that we (or modern science) don't know or don't understand.
You right to a point however you are twisting things. We can't disprove the existence of elves but that doesn't mean we should attempt to justify the belief in them. I certainly wouldn't believe in them unless extraordinary evidence came about.
Of course scientific knowledge doesn't know of and understand everything that's the reason why we have science in the first place. We still make discoveries today its not like science has come to a complete stop like how you make it sound. Also just because we may not have the answer to a question doesn't mean we should just insert religious bs
as the answer and call it a day.
Quote:
Even our brain is a mystery, and what kind of mystery it is! You don't know why you dream, there is only speculation. You don't know why people have lucid dreams. We don't know a great things about it, how it works, or why it work the way it does.
While we are certainly still learning about our brains your comment makes it sound like we know nothing which couldn't be further from the truth.
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I tend to think that we are evolving as we are learning about ourselves and our surroundings. Thus we advance in all aspects of life. What lies 'beyond' is a mystery that, probably, keeps the people going on. You can look at the world and say: there is so many death, people are killing other people (which is only specific to our kind, there isn't a single proof of other animals doing the same), there is poverty, famine. But there is also a good side of life. When you are in love, when you look around you and see the beautiful environment that is given for us to use and to enjoy.
As a atheist who is still "going on" I guess my existence kills your assumption. I don't wonder what happens after death in fact I am sure I will lose all consciousness. I will not see the pearly gates or any other after life mythology.
Why do you blatantly lie? killing within species isn't limited to Humans. If a outside male lion takes over a pride they will not only kill the male lions but the cubs as well. Female lions will also kill the cubs of other prides if they come across them.
Here are just some animals that kill each other.
Dolphins
Monkeys
Many types of insects
Many types of rodents
African hunting dogs
Several types of birds.
and that's just a short list.
Quote:
Don't let some books decide what you will believe. Take many sides, and then carefully wage what makes sense to you.
The problem is many people will accept things because they want it to be true and so it will make sense to them.
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and I'm sure he will disagree with that.
).
There is so much things on earth and in universe that we (or modern science) don't know or don't understand.
