Is athiesm a belief? What is "God?"

[hsrob]

raptors11 said:

whatever said:

If there is this all powerful being, where did he come from?

Lamest question in history. I can ask the same thing just reverse it, where did everything needed for the big bang come from?

Well not quite actually.  The Big Bang Theory doesn't state that everything came from nothing, we just like to simplify it that way because it's easier to understand. 

What I don't understand is that many people seem to have no problem accepting a God that either spontaneously came in to being, or one that has existed for all time, yet can't fathom that all matter in the universe was created spontaneously at a finite point in the past. 

One requires us to accept the 'spontaneous' creation of a bunch of simple elemental particles which have gradually acquired more complex arrangements over the intervening 13 billion years.  The other requires us to accept the spontaneous creation of a fully formed, omnipotent being who then set about fashioning the rest of the universe, or the continuous existance of said being throughout all time, a concept no less brain twisting to me than generation of matter from a singularity.

One we have some evidence for, the other we don't.

OT: I think Atheism is a belief that there is no such thing as a sentient, omnipotent being.  If we are going to define God as losely as the sum total of all physical laws or some similarly abstract concept, the bounds of Atheism would be very limited.