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Forums - General Discussion - Do you believe in God? Why/Why not?

 

Do you believe in any god?

Yes 63 36.21%
 
No 111 63.79%
 
Total:174

I believe in proof. I will start to believe in God after I've seen some evidence.

If there actually is a god then it's most likely nothing like that thing described in the major religions.

Last edited by vivster - on 23 August 2018

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I'm terrified of a world without God. Whenever we reject God as the source of unquestionable and unnegiotable rules and values, terrible things happen. If you look at the most violent regimes ever - Mao's China, USSR, 3rd Reich - rejection of God was the foundation of their ideologies. Think of the French revolution - "enlightment emphasized the importance of rational thinking and began challenging legal and moral foundations of society" (from Wikipedia). Sounds familiar? All it led to was the "Reign of Terror" and massive manslaughter. We're going down the same path in the West now. The more we reject God, the fewer values we have and the murkier everything becomes. What's our highest value at this point? Cause it's not even life with abortion and eutanasia being commonplace.

It's so good to be Catholic and live in a Catholic country.



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Scisca said:
I'm terrified of a world without God. Whenever we reject God as the source of unquestionable and unnegiotable rules and values, terrible things happen. If you look at the most violent regimes ever - Mao's China, USSR, 3rd Reich - rejection of God was the foundation of their ideologies. Think of the French revolution - "enlightment emphasized the importance of rational thinking and began challenging legal and moral foundations of society" (from Wikipedia). Sounds familiar? All it led to was the "Reign of Terror" and massive manslaughter. We're going down the same path in the West now. The more we reject God, the fewer values we have and the murkier everything becomes. What's our highest value at this point? Cause it's not even life with abortion and eutanasia being commonplace.

It's so good to be Catholic and live in a Catholic country.

Rejection of religion was not a cause of these regimes, but rather a consequence. Because they were so totalitarian, there was simply no place for a God anymore. The people were supposed to worship the great leader, and no one else. The dictator basically replaced God. That's why these regimes tend to be so similar to ultra-religious societies: both are based on blindly following an authority, and limiting the freedom of thought of the people (directly or indirectly).



Flilix said:
Scisca said:
I'm terrified of a world without God. Whenever we reject God as the source of unquestionable and unnegiotable rules and values, terrible things happen. If you look at the most violent regimes ever - Mao's China, USSR, 3rd Reich - rejection of God was the foundation of their ideologies. Think of the French revolution - "enlightment emphasized the importance of rational thinking and began challenging legal and moral foundations of society" (from Wikipedia). Sounds familiar? All it led to was the "Reign of Terror" and massive manslaughter. We're going down the same path in the West now. The more we reject God, the fewer values we have and the murkier everything becomes. What's our highest value at this point? Cause it's not even life with abortion and eutanasia being commonplace.

It's so good to be Catholic and live in a Catholic country.

Rejection of religion was not a cause of these regimes, but rather a consequence. Because they were so totalitarian, there was simply no place for a God anymore. The people were supposed to worship the great leader, and no one else. The dictator basically replaced God. That's why these regimes tend to be so similar to ultra-religious societies: both are based on blindly following an authority, and limiting the freedom of thought of the people (directly or indirectly).

But isn't that what humans tend to do anyways? You see it now in American politics. You have a good amount of people on the right "worship" Trump, and on the left worship government. It seems to be a human trait to worship an ideal, in whatever form that may be. 



WolfpackN64 said:
LuccaCardoso1 said:

Such as...

Well, you have the classical tripartite of the ontological argument (God exists because he is the highest conceivable being)

Well, that argument is plainly and simply nonsensical. Something does not automatically exist just because it's the most perfect thing you can think of. Actually, there are reasons to think that, exactly because it is the most perfect thing imaginable, it cannot exist, such as the problem of evil:

1. God exists.

2. God is omnipotent, perfectly good and omniscient.

3. A perfectly good being would want to prevent all evils.

4. An omniscient being knows every way in which evils can come into existence.

5. An omnipotent being who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence has the power to prevent that evil from coming into existence.

6. A being who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence, who is able to prevent that evil from coming into existence, and who wants to do so, would prevent the existence of that evil.

7. If there exists an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good being, then no evil exists.

8. Evil exists, therefore it's impossible for an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good being to exist.

WolfpackN64 said:

the teleological argument (God exists because everything in nature has a purpose and a means of functioning and he is responsible)

That's intelligent design, and it's a lie. Not everything in nature has a purpose and nature is far from perfect. One example of that is extinction. If nature was really perfect, no species would ever go extinct. A more specific one is the recurrent laryngeal nerve (Richard Dawkins demonstrated it greatly here), which goes from the brain to the larynx. Instead of going directly, in a straight line, it makes a huge detour, going down to the chest, passing around the arteries and going up again. In giraffes, it means a 4.5m detour (15ft). The list of examples is very long.

WolfpackN64 said: 

and the cosmological argument (we are all contingent beings, being that we have the possibility to exist and not exist and if we exist, we exist for a certain period in time. We as contingent beings come forth from other contingent beings in a chain of cause and effect, but this chain must end since neither time, nor cause and effect can regress indefinitely, so there must be a necessary being at the start that can cause but is not caused himself).

Therefore, God? That's just the god of the gaps, just because we don't know how the universe started that doesn't mean god exists.

Time is a really complex subject, and I don't have enough knowledge about cosmology to explain it, but from what I know, time will go slower or faster depending on where you are in the universe, so time can go slow enough to don't exist at all.

WolfpackN64 said: 

Furthermore you have arguments like Pascal's wager which states that in the event that God does exist, it's better to be a believer, but since we don't know if he exist, it's rational to believe, since it wouldn't net you any negatives if he didn't exist, while not believing if he does exist would be a negative.

By that logic, you should believe in every single god, not just the Christian one. If you just believe in one god, your chance of believing in the right god is almost zero. You should also believe in every single thing ever, as long as it doesn't directly affect you negatively.

And btw, I don't agree with the phrase "it wouldn't net you any negatives if he didn't exist".



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I don't know if I believe in God or not. The universe we live in appears to be nothing more than part of a single explosion that's probably taking place within a infinitely larger universe we'll never see or know about and probably only being perceived as like one second by any life form(s) that exist(s) out there in that larger, other universe, which may itself be just like a speck in a dew drop of another, even universe or something. It just seems silly to me at this point believe that whatever else may be out there so much as knows that we exist or created us intentionally, let alone is intimately involved in our daily affairs. That just seems preposterous to me. We, to anything else that may be out there, are almost certainly not even perceived at all. We're just like billions of microscopic organisms that exist within a speck (our planet) that are born, live, and die in miniscule, imperceptible fractions of a second to whatever it is that may be out there, if anything. We just don't want to admit that our existence is pointless and that we'll never even begin to know the nature of everything is all because it's a depressing realization.

That's my opinion.



Well He (She?) did a pretty sh*tty job if He did exist. What designer would make the gigantic mistake of making you air-intake the same hole as the one you stuff your energy-source in?! I guess that’s what he did saturday-evening.



WolfpackN64 said:
Flilix said:

What about Gaunilo's island?

To be fair, the ontological argument IS the weakest one and I'm not a fan of it. I just presented it as an option, but it is generally not hard to criticise.

Without any further explanation, I do also find the cosmological argument highly dubious. It describes the limits of what a person can intuitively imagine, very much not what modern mathematics or physics are capable of describing (both the conclusion that you can't work with infinities and that you can't have a starting or ending event.) Numerous things that we know with much more certainty to be true work outside of the limits of human imagination, but rather work through the same abstract mathematical and physical rules that would allow those things. Think speed being non-additive, or gravity curving the shortest path between two points. 



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LuccaCardoso1 said:
WolfpackN64 said:

Well, you have the classical tripartite of the ontological argument (God exists because he is the highest conceivable being)

Well, that argument is plainly and simply nonsensical. Something does not automatically exist just because it's the most perfect thing you can think of. Actually, there are reasons to think that, exactly because it is the most perfect thing imaginable, it cannot exist, such as the problem of evil:

1. God exists.

2. God is omnipotent, perfectly good and omniscient.

3. A perfectly good being would want to prevent all evils.

4. An omniscient being knows every way in which evils can come into existence.

5. An omnipotent being who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence has the power to prevent that evil from coming into existence.

6. A being who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence, who is able to prevent that evil from coming into existence, and who wants to do so, would prevent the existence of that evil.

7. If there exists an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good being, then no evil exists.

8. Evil exists, therefore it's impossible for an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good being to exist.

WolfpackN64 said:

the teleological argument (God exists because everything in nature has a purpose and a means of functioning and he is responsible)

That's intelligent design, and it's a lie. Not everything in nature has a purpose and nature is far from perfect. One example of that is extinction. If nature was really perfect, no species would ever go extinct. A more specific one is the recurrent laryngeal nerve (Richard Dawkins demonstrated it greatly here), which goes from the brain to the larynx. Instead of going directly, in a straight line, it makes a huge detour, going down to the chest, passing around the arteries and going up again. In giraffes, it means a 4.5m detour (15ft). The list of examples is very long.

WolfpackN64 said: 

and the cosmological argument (we are all contingent beings, being that we have the possibility to exist and not exist and if we exist, we exist for a certain period in time. We as contingent beings come forth from other contingent beings in a chain of cause and effect, but this chain must end since neither time, nor cause and effect can regress indefinitely, so there must be a necessary being at the start that can cause but is not caused himself).

Therefore, God? That's just the god of the gaps, just because we don't know how the universe started that doesn't mean god exists.

Time is a really complex subject, and I don't have enough knowledge about cosmology to explain it, but from what I know, time will go slower or faster depending on where you are in the universe, so time can go slow enough to don't exist at all.

WolfpackN64 said: 

Furthermore you have arguments like Pascal's wager which states that in the event that God does exist, it's better to be a believer, but since we don't know if he exist, it's rational to believe, since it wouldn't net you any negatives if he didn't exist, while not believing if he does exist would be a negative.

By that logic, you should believe in every single god, not just the Christian one. If you just believe in one god, your chance of believing in the right god is almost zero. You should also believe in every single thing ever, as long as it doesn't directly affect you negatively.

And btw, I don't agree with the phrase "it wouldn't net you any negatives if he didn't exist".

Again, the ontological argument isn't perfect. But what is extremely flawed is the argument of the problem of evil.  Because for no evil to exist, free will would need to be nonexistant. It's a big element of the Christian God that he gave men free will, it's one of THE most important aspects of our religion. For him to deny the possibility of men to do evil would be to deny free will. Basically, God can create a world in which there would be no evil, yet he gave us one where the possibiliyu of evil exists, so we can live in freedom. The problem of evil is such a terrible sham argument it makes my blood boil whenever someone brings it up.

Intelligent design is a product of the teleological argument, but the teleological argument isn't the same as intelligent design and in many respects, the argument is much more complex.

The cosmological argument doesn't necessarily use time, but in the variant which uses time, it starts from the assumption that time has a beginning (which is in all likelihood true).

As for Pascal's Wager. The man is a mathematician, pretty sure he didn't consider other Gods. And anyone with a healthy religious lifestyle will not net you any negatives if God doesn't exist.



palou said:
WolfpackN64 said:

To be fair, the ontological argument IS the weakest one and I'm not a fan of it. I just presented it as an option, but it is generally not hard to criticise.

Without any further explanation, I do also find the cosmological argument highly dubious. It describes the limits of what a person can intuitively imagine, very much not what modern mathematics or physics are capable of describing (both the conclusion that you can't work with infinities and that you can't have a starting or ending event.) Numerous things that we know with much more certainty to be true work outside of the limits of human imagination, but rather work through the same abstract mathematical and physical rules that would allow those things. Think speed being non-additive, or gravity curving the shortest path between two points. 

Note that they work with the impossibility of an infinite regress, which is probably correct concerning our universe.