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roflroflrfol!

There is some evidence for it. The universe is proven to be moving away from a central expanding point- referred to as the big bang. But that's where any  observation ends, and as you say the unproven hypotheses start. You' re partly correct.

I am not an Athiest nor an Agnostic.

However I think that any belief in how the world was created is no more then a belief based on faith in the unseen. Christians believe in their God , Muslims theirs, Jews there's , Hindu's , Sihks and yes even Atheists.

Now some say that their belief is more then faith, that they have cold hard scientific facts. But lets look at Science has Science over the last few thousand years stayed consistant? Scientists taught Alchemy was that fact? Scientists taught that the world was flat was that right? Scientists taught many different theories of evolution concluding all theories had some flaws and taking bits and peices from different theories to create the modern theory.

Most recently I watched on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) a segment. The segment said that we are 4% genetically related to Neanderthals. Infact we have more genetically in common with Pigs and Chimpanzees. The segment said that it would be hard to say we were related to the Neanderthals and that text books may have to be re-written.I graduated a few years ago and in school was taught that we evolved directly from Neanderthals. That Neanderthals were our ancestors.Then only a few years later I find out, yah we have more incommon genetically with Pigs.

Science evolves and without faith you can't actually believe any scientific theology. Who knows a hundred years from now we could be looking at Evolution the same way we did when the world realized the Earth wasn't flat.

As such I find that Athiesm is a faith and closer to a religion than most Athiests realize. The On The Origin of species is revered as a religious text. Also reported on the news a few church's have openned in the US, Church's of Athiesm. So now that their is a faith based text with a church and people going out into the community trying to convert non-believers.

How is Atheism any different than any other organized religion?

In science a theory is as high an accolade an idea can achieve (at least in modern science, where the level of law is almost impossible to reach now). It requires volumes of evidence that had gone through rigorous peer review to support it and the support from thousands of scientists.

And to say there is no evidence for the big bang seems like a confusing and wrong claim to me. There is tonnes of evidence that the big bang theory was developed from. When we monitor other galaxies we can measures their rate of acceleration and direction from the shift in the apparent frequency of light (as with the doppler effect) and we find one thing, everything is moving away from each other and us. The only way this can be possible is for the Universe to be expanding. We've measured the rate of expansion and if we extrapolate the data backwards we find that at some point 13.7 billion years ago everything had to be part of a singularity before it exapanded. We call the moment of expansion from this singularity the big bang (it's just a catchy title, it was more of an expansion as opposed to explosion).

I can go on all day providing microwave background maps and analysing the abundance of Hydrogen, but I've got stuff to do. I just feel  compelled to argue posts like these as I just love physics too much . Sorry.

Atheism is the lack of belief in a God(s), the same way that most people are 'atheists' to unicorns and fairies.

Most people are atheist to all Gods but one or a few anyway.

Technically a god or deity is defined as such when there is some sort of worshipping. That can range from simple rituals like hitting a tin when it's raining to elaborate and organized structures, moral norms, dogmas etc.

Things that have been gods, have stopped being considered as such. Some of them very tangible things that nobody can deny them their existence. Fire, the ocean, storms and whatnots, ancient people had no need to put a "person" in control over those, the forces themselves were unknown and scary enough. Well, fire hasn't changed much but by a huge majority the fire itself isn't regarded as anything divine (your faith's God(s) can be controlling the fire, but that is different).

When considering creationism, I think it's safe to say that the events as described in any known religious record, are not correct. Intelligent Design theory wouldn't need to be around if the majority of people were fine with taking the creation myths literally. We have to go back to a "force" creating the laws of nature rather than that force rolling up a sun, or one of those forces being the sun itself (and the sun is vital, so Sun gods have been all over the place).

I do consider myself atheist, and frankly that is very unlikely to change even if the existence of a force that creates universes like ours is absolutely proven. A few scenarios:

- created by a non-sentient force. Like something that creates universes like we create CO2. This is the closest to today's fire-atheism vs. ancient people worshipping fire. That force which creates universes, or at least one universe and its laws, is nobody's god. It never dictated holy books or did revelations. IMO a strong believer would cope with such an unaware and undemanding entity a lot harder than an atheist. I'm certainly not going to worship that force. Just be wowed at what stuff exists.

- created by a sentient, non-intervening force. Maybe a huge experiment for observations. Maybe it's not even observing. That isn't any religion's god either. It doesn't demand certain behaviour, doesn't judge, doesn't do anything once the universe is there. It would be like discovering the super aliens that are not out to rule and kill us.

- created by a sentient, intervening force. This is the Intelligent design more or less. Something created the universe, it has let us know the rules, it expects us to worship. And the problem to me is that the creation myths can't be true, so that part of this god's faith is false. Did that god continuously reveal more and more sophisticated creation stories and sides of itself (because, seriously, the gaps between a fire god, a scandalous Greek gods society and self-sacrificing Jesus are huge). Or was it a team? Did they tell a different story in different parts of the world?  Are all religions and their gods true? Or is it just one and everyone else is making stuff up because for some reason that creator only chose to tell some, conveniently not scattered around the world?

Another possibility is that people needed an explanation of where they were and who they were and myths came around. That is proven behaviour of humans. So I take the logical approach that humans come up with explanations that are not true when lacking knowledge, that humans can believe a lot of things they are told when lacking knowledge, that religion has been used for social control and it's good at that, and that of course we lack any evidence even about further interventions putting the creation aside.

We cannot disprove much about the current gods. The ones like the sun has been disproved however. The ones now are a lot more elusive seeing as we don't know where they are or what they are or whether we can see/sense/measure anything about them.

Recap - While I don't think our world was crafted in its mechanisms (planned or unplanned), even if one day we had no doubt about that being the case, I absolutely don't believe that this creator has anything to do with people's various gods.

Muslim here, no doubt in my mind that there is a God.

I'm sorry, but I have to answer this because shows a slight misunderstanding about the scientific method.

Science is the ever lasting search for the laws that govern nature. We will never be 100% correct, but we will always be ever improving . Whenever I hear this kind of view of science I'm always reminded of Isaac Asimov's essay 'The relativity of wrong', in which he explains how science is always an ongoing quest, and our understanding will never shrink and will always grow. The example he used is the one you cited, the shape of the Earth. I'll give you a quick ruin through of it.

Thousands of years ago, before the ancient Greeks the committee was out on the shape of the Earth, some thought flat, some thought spherical, some even though pear shaped. But it wasn't until we realised that a pole in the ground in the north will have a different length shadow to one in the south cast at mid day. This allowed us to determine that the Earth was spherical as we could work out the Angle between the two points. We later leaned through observations of other worlds and then our own that the Earth wasn't spherical, but oblate spheroidal. When we developed satellite technology we could measure the Earth extremely accurately and we found that it was also ever so slightly pear shaped. We now understand the shape of the Earth better than when some thought it was flat, and tomorrow we will not suddenly find out it has been flat or cube shaped all along.

Our knowledge of the shape of the Earth has never regressed, it has only increased. And this is how science works. No scientist worth his salt will ever decree their field complete. No evolutionary biologist will ever say "well that's it, we understand everything about evolution", they will only ever say "we understand more than we did yesterday".

And yes, sometimes science can get it wrong, but the scientific method is geared towards finding out what is wrong and correct it. After centuries of maturity we are now finding that we understand things to the point where we can be very sure we're in the right area. The sheer volume of evidence for evolution is so astonishing that we can be sure that evolution does occur; however there are still many questions evolutionary biologists have to ask about various mechanisms and causes, but in general we know we're right. We know that tomorrow we wont find a piece of evidence that disproves the thousands of observations we have made so far.

With evolution we are always increasing the knowledge we have on the subject and we are always adapting the theory to be ever more correct. You claim that in 100 years we could look back on it like a flat Earth. Not so. The point we're at in evolution is the same point we were at when we found out that the Earth was oblate spheroidal. We're not right, but we're very nearly right and we can be certain that tomorrow we wont find out that the Earth is a cube or that the origin of species was down to a God.

The bottom line is after a field has developed properly over a few centuries (or perhaps even decades) our certainty in it being correct grows. Incorrect theories often don't last for very long, where as correct ones last indefinitely.

It's not completely random. Scientists have recreated early Earth conditions and found that certain bio-polymers form quite rapidly (using lightning as a catalyst). There is a gap in our knowledge between biopolymers and the formation of nucleic acids as we know them (RNA), although the observed polymers are similar to RNA/DNA in structure.

We do know however, that RNA can form catalytic structures and that "life" (I use this term rather broadly in this sense) likely started as a pool of catalytic nucleic acid molecules and other organic compunds which eventually enveloped the simple biocatalysts to form cell like structures (not mitochondria, early life would be much simpler).

The problem with this is that even if a membrane did form the nucleic acid catalysts would need to be self-replicating to truly give rise to full blown life.

DNA and protein catalysis would have arisen later (my lectures didn't cover that part of early life).

I see no reason to believe in God, so therefore I do not believe in God. I see no evidence for a God to exist in this universe so therefore I believe a God does not exist.

Also I am both agnostic and atheist, I do not believe the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven but neither do I believe one exists.