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Forums - General Discussion - Why don't you believe in a god?

MARCUSDJACKSON on 25 July 2010

wow! a real debate. and it went real well to. i found everything said in this thread logical, and by said logic everything makes sense. something had to happen for life to exsit so whether it be god, a big bang, or old saint nick the theory works.



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Rath on 25 July 2010
theARTIST0017 said:
Armads said:
theARTIST0017 said:
vlad321 said:

So I have yet to see a good answer as to why we should listen to God and belive in him and not fairies and unicorns and cyclops and other such creatures which have exactly as much evidence as any god in any religion.

That's ok. Nobody's forcing you to believe in anything. You choose to believe in what you want that's sorta how free will works. If you don't believe in God now, most likely you're not going to believe in him later. Most people don't change.

What makes you think you have free will?

God or not there is no such thing as free will, the timeline of the universe is determined at it's very beginning (though that's not the beginning of time, just the universe, the big bang is the beginning of our universe because any event before the big bang would not have any effect on what happened after that event so therefore it is irrelevant to our universe just as our universe will have no effect upon the next one after the big crunch and next big bang.)

Quantum theory seems to indicate that the universe is not deterministic. Particles move in a way determined by probability, so you can't tell where they are going to be based on their current position and momentum.

Oh and your bit about people not changing is totally wrong, people changes religions and belief systems all the time.  I was raised Roman catholic, studied buddhism breifly, then settled on an atheistic worldview which accepts logical assertions such as panpsychism versus eliminative materialism; either one is logically sound so I accept them both as possibilities. 

Studies show less than 1/2 of all Americans stay with the faith they were brought up in, most change once or twice in their lives.

No such thing as free will? You seem delusional.

It's currently hard to debate on this as we don't understand human consciousness. However free will would require the brain to be non-deterministic, which doesn't seem likely to be honest.

BIG BANG THE BEGINNING? AND YOU CAN BRING ME PAPERS (FACTS) TO PROVE THIS "BIG BANG THEORY". Dude its called the Big Bang Theory for a reason. 

Already been thoroughly debated =P

Yeah people change but most likely if you are raised a  certain religion, that is what you will stick to because its 1. what you know and 2. what you've believed your whole life.

Whee. Chance to debate two opposing posts at once =P written underlined in both posts.



oldschoolfool on 25 July 2010

I don't believe in a god because I'm like a single version of Al bundy from married with childeren. lol



ManusJustus on 30 July 2010
theARTIST0017 said:
ManusJustus said:
Chairman-Mao said:

I do believe in a God because something had to create the world. I find it hard to believe a "big bang" created a world and made life possible, that just sounds stupid to me.

Yeah, because an magical, invisible man makes much more sense.


ManusJustus you're being silly. 1. Who ever told you he was an invisible man? Have you never pondered how life itself came about? Or do you just sit there and say I don't know science and it's thousands of theories will eventually prove it. Or maybe you think to yourself, "I don't care." Because if you did that would be ignorant. I mean there is nothing wrong with science, I love science myself and I like to learn about the universe. But that doesn't mean that one day a scientist is going to fly to the "end of space" and come back with an answer.

There is verifiable evidence that the universe is 13 billion years old and the Earth is 4.5 billion years old (well understood physics and chemistry, which I can explain if need be).

For the question of how life came about, I have two options:

1. A chemical process allowed for atoms to form into a self-replicating molecule, which overtime led to more and more complicated chemical reactions, eventually becoming what we call life.

2. A super powerful man came along and created life.

Option one makes a lot more sense to me.



GameOver22 on 30 July 2010
Akvod said:

I don't because I like to make as few assumptions as possible, and because I like simplicity.

One can go all nihilist and say that reality itself can't be proven, since observation itself is in question.

Okay then, but I'm sure both religious and non-religious people aren't nihilist. I'm sure we all don't believe that we're in some kind of matrix.

So we all assume the existence of the world, and that our observations are reliable. That's the axiom we all live off of in my opinion, our one big assumption.

From this axiom (that the world exists and our observations are reliable) we can do inductive and deductive reasoning. We can induce the fundamental rules and laws of our reality (inducing the law of gravity by seeing an apple fall, or dropping two objects of different mass from a building), and then use those laws to deduce things that we might not be able to see or observe. That's science in my opinion, and in my opinion everyone's a scientist. We all accept reality for what it is, we remember what reality is, and we make predictions based on that memory.

So the thing is, why don't we bring a god into our big picture?

A)To explain the unexplainable.

B) To explain the origin of reality

Simply saying that goddit isn't an explanation. In fact, that's just a more complicated answer. Here's how it looks in my mind:

?->God exists->Reality exists

vs

Reality exists

 

Even if we go with:

God always existed->Reality exists

vs

Reality exists

That's 2 things vs 1.

 

It's the same reason why I don't believe that little people live in my fridge, and hide when I open the door anymore. It's why I don't believe that everytime I go back to my car, someone may have replaced it with an exactly same looking car. It's simply unneeded to believe such a thing. Nothing changes, and it's just unnecessary.

Also, to me god is just the same as replacing one unknown with another unknown, as Thuderf00t says it.

?->God->Universe

?->Universe

Why do we need a middle man? Why believe in one extra, unnecessary thing?

I haven't gone through the entire thread yet, but I was just going to add some stuff here. First off, the simplicity argument is probably the strongest one for atheism right now, and Dawkins is the most famous proponent of it right now. He sets it forth in "The God Delusion", but theists also use Ockham's razor to argue for the existence of God.

1. This is just a small note, but we actually infer the law of gravity. We do not induce it. Induction would be like, "I've dropped four objects from a building and they all accelerate at the rate of 9.8m/s2, therefore the next object I drop will fall at the rate of 9.8m/s2. In order to get to the law of gravity, someone has to look for the cause of objects falling at 9.8m/s2 and determine that the law of gravity is the best explanation for the phenomena. We do use induction to get to the law of gravity, but inference allows us to go from things falling at a uniform rate to a gravitational law.

2. The simplicity argument is easier to understand when looking at the origin of the universe. The question is simply, "what is the simplest cause for the beginning of the universe?" Theologians will say God while atheists will say chance is the better explanation. Atheists will say God is infinitely complex because of God's omniscience, so God is the most complex explanation possible. Therefore, it is eliminated by Ockham's razor.

However, theologians will argue that God, being nothing but a mind, is the simplest being imaginable. This idea is quite hard to explain, but the idea is that God is a single substance, and the facets and aspects of the universe can be derived from this single substance.