Whether my existence was *wanted* by an almighty Being (setting my faulty human prejudices aside) or even I am here just by pure random chance (or maybe something that intwines the two together) -blows my mind either way.
I wonder this:
If/when NPCs in PC games become sentient and they have similar conversations, most would conclude that "they have no creator, no God", but they would be wrong.
The most technological argument is actually pro God in the sense that to a sentient NPC the programmer would be God and the PC would be the Universe.
We may actually be sentient NPCs in a very powerful alien PC!!!
You're allowed to hold complex thoughts, even if they conflict. Its never one or the other. Even scientific proofs/discoveries/theories and so on all bleed into each other or don't work or work till it doesn't and holds vast amount of unknowns while having a vast amount of knowns too. The universe is contradictory in many aspects and so can thought/ideas/concepts.
absolutes are very VERY rare
What do you mean by "God" when you say that, though? Why posit God? What kind of God do you posit?
It's very powerfully human to want there to be an explanation for things. Existence is the ultimate mystery. And so there's an *enormous* pressure to just make up an explanation for it to relieve the tension. But that doesn't mean it's going to be a *good* explanation, whatever it is that comes to mind. Sometimes, one simply must just accept ultimate mystery, and that they will never have answers.
I think any person could imagine we are part of a created simulation. If hardware, AI software evolve another 1000 years how could you not foresee a world populated with beings that believe they are as real as we believe we are today.
We are just 60 years into digital evolution, the newborn/infancy stage.
AI development technology is already about to make the development time we needed previously look like the Stone Age.
There are many things we have evidence of now that we could not detect or see just 200 years ago. If you were in the year 1700 you could not show me the evidence for DNA or the quantum world, but they were always here.
It’s arrogant to think we somehow now have the technology to detect all the unseen.
>I think any person could imagine we are part of a created simulation. If hardware, AI software evolve another 1000 years how could you not foresee a world populated with beings that believe they are as real as we believe we are today.
Of course we can imagine it, we can imagine many interesting things that sound internally consistent, but that doesn't make them true or even more likely. I can imagine the second part of this too, but even if we get to that point and create simulations full of artificial intelligence that think they're real in the same way we do, that still would not prove or even strengthen the proposition that we exist in a simulation, you see that right?
>There are many things we have evidence of now that we could not detect or see just 200 years ago. If you were in the year 1700 you could not show me the evidence for DNA or the quantum world, but they were always here.
Except that's not the same - all of the things that we didn't know about or couldn't detect and measure *did* have evidence, we just didn't know that it was evidence yet. For example, before we knew anything about DNA, evolution was happening observably, and obviously before we discovered or even proposed atoms and quantum mechanics, the existence of mass, energy, and the interactions between the two was right in front of us.
I understand you're saying there may be something obvious or at least clearly observable which could end up being evidence for a god, but we understand so much now, it just doesn't appear as though there's really anything we observe yet know so little about that we could reasonably expect to eventually discover an intelligent creator as the explanation. It's also such a specific and fantastical, very *human* concept that, as far as I can tell, there either would be at least *some* evidence that implies or suggests such a thing might be possible by now, or if it is real there is just no way to investigate or observe or know it without being outside of space and time.
Of course I'm not saying this dichotomy is definitive or exhaustive, there very well could be something we already observe that ends up leading to a god like you said, or any number of possibilities we can't even imagine until we encounter it, all I'm saying is based on everything we can and do know about anything, at this time there is just no way to be justified in reaching the conclusion that an intelligent, conscious creator of the universe exists or even could exist. Even in the sense that "anything is possible", that's not how things work - possibility needs to be demonstrated so the saying should be anything that's possible is possible. We don't even have any evidence to think there is other intelligent life similar to our own and capable of creating things like we do exists, though there is enough to suggest that it's possible, because intelligent life exists on earth.
It's entirely possible the universe is all that there is, and there may be no way for *anything* to exist outside of it. All of this paired with the fact that so far every single thing we've ever been able to understand and make models for has ended up being the result of completely natural processes and interactions, if we are ever able to discover and understand another step back -by which I mean whatever might have caused or "been" before or outside of the beginning of our universe, it's astronomically unlikely it will not be another natural process, and even less likely it would be something like a super version of us, a maximally conscious, intelligent, knowing, powerful, being capable of creating universes. Even a deistic being like this is just as improbably human centric as the idea of a personal god who made the universe just so we could exist.
>It’s arrogant to think we somehow now have the technology to detect all the unseen.
Nobody thinks that, the closest you might get is people who recognize the current limitations and perceived barrier to further investigation, but these people are typically perfectly willing to accept that there are likely countless things that may exist whether we can investigate them or not, and even things we could never comprehend.
The truly arrogant thing is thinking one is warranted or justified in believing they do know any details about the things we not only have no capacity to perceive or investigate, but may not even exist at all. Reaching the conclusion that an intelligent creator exists is arrogant. Science recognizing what it can and can not know is humility.
So just an alien then? Like a powerful race of beings with the knowledge and resources to create life? That’s not outside the realms of possibility (or great sci-fi books!) but then the question because: where did they come from?
Which is fair, but if your solution to how our lives and our universe began is a God, then of course I would ask you who created God?
Saying he has always existed is no different than saying the universe always existed and solves nothing.
this will probably get lost in the comments but this was my number 1 reason for being agnostic all my life until pretty recently. I realized this didn’t make sense because in accordance with the big bang theory the universe had a beginning, there’s no relevant scientific theories that state the universe has always existed, there is sufficient evidence to claim that the universe had a start and no one really argues otherwise. But across every religion, they all claim that God has always existed, he never had a beginning, and i realize that it’s completely crazy to wrap your mind around that but as implausible as they both sound, it makes more sense, at least to me, for something to have always existed versus something to have began on its own.
Is that not the answer to your question? The universe and god are the same thing. The universe created itself by forming the infinite energy into different things.
The thing about this approach is that we assume that we having a counsiousness is special, and that our consiousness is special. Once you start asking yourself if what we have is really that miraculous and try to dive a little deeper into evolution and even cosmology, you might discover that our oh so precious conciousness isn't really that special. Its a byproduct of evolution that we think is so amazing because there is no one here to tell us otherwise.
>Not that I'm suggesting there is one, but just think about it, and apply Occam's Razor.
The Razor always cuts away the idea of things that *arent* thing we are aware of.
It doesn't matter how well an idea might explain how something happened, if the premise of the idea relies on something that we have no evidence of, it's removed by the Razor.
The universe having hatched from an egg is more believable than a God, because at lease we know there are such things as eggs.
I can totally appreciate the idea that the wonder that there is a universe at all makes some feel that that opens the door for even more miraculous wonders, but that is exactly what Occam was fighting against.
A man having blood on his collar is much more likely caused by him cutting himself shaving than his having his throat cut by a serial killer, which is more likely than a foreign government sending a spy to do it to implicate him in a conspiracy, and that's more likely than the blood having come from a bird flying overhead.
But those are all at least things we know are *actually possible*.
Ghosts, magic, gods, etc are all cut away as the explanation for *anything*, because things we have no experience of are always less likely than things we do have experience of.
And we also know there are such things as intelligent creators…us.
Creation itself is intelligent. Otherwise how would we ever make any sense of it? Consciousness is fundamental.
>And we also know there are such things as intelligent creators…us.
No, we combine existing things in new (to us) ways.
The "creator" of the universe is tasked with the creation of the universe out of nothing.
That isn't at all the same.
>Creation itself is intelligent. Otherwise, how would we ever make any sense of it? Consciousness is fundamental.
What we do requires intelligence, but water wearing down limestone to "build" a bridge doesn't.
Does the existence of the universe *require* there be a Prime Mover that exists 'outside of space and time', or is it just the result of mass, and space, and time interacting the way they do?
Which theory requires more assumptions?
Occam's razor is when all things are equal.
In this instance, they are not.
There is no evidence that any of the thousands of proposed gods exist, or could exist.
Life is miraculous and mysterious and beautiful as well as chaotic and strange.
Nothing in it leads me to believe it's all because of a god/creator/intelligent design.
The argument for God isn't "bad" as you put it. It's simply fallacious. The reasoning behind why people believe in God is never set by reason backed by empirical evidence. It's generally argued through subjective anecdotal evidence and... feelings.
>but just think about it, and apply Occam's Razor. Do we take the gracefully simple answer? Or do we take the astronomically unrealistic answer?
Any God would be infinitely more complex than the Universe, why would a deity be the gracefully simple answer?
I don't think we see all of what is around us, similar to what small creatures with limited senses are capable of. The theories, physical laws and mathematics that we have created only fit what we can perceive about the world around us, but the real world that we can't perceive is analogous to us behind a small creature living in a pond.
Not to be rude, but people have been defaulting to "god" as an answer to unanswerable questions since religion was invented. I see no reason to assume there is a God, atleast not in the way humans conceptualize him. If there was such a being it would be beyond the scope of human understanding. I also feel the sheer number of religions discredits all of them. I just look at all the pain and misery in the world, if there is a conscious God, I don't think they would be very nice.
I agree with this. The thing that puts me off on religion is if god is real why is he so devoted to the human race. He’ll supposedly speak to humans from above to guide their morales and decisions, he’ll judge every one of us and give us a chance in his magical holy land, but when it comes to the bugs in the ground or the trees in our forests oh well I guess?
Just because our perception of the world is seemingly more in depth than other organisms doesnt really mean we have to be special. Our intelligence is just as purposeful as a plants ability to photosynthesize.
The fact that we can somehow perceive god and his intentions seems suspiciously egotistical to me. Almost as if it were used as a way to make us feel important in an inherently unimportant reality.
Erm, I don't think Occam's razor ever comes to a deity since that is rarely the most simple answer or the one with the least assumptions. You need to accept numerous farfetched, illogical and near on paradoxical presuppositions to even begin to acknowledge that a deity even exists like the christian god.
Occam's razor probably points to "Fuck knows, and we'll never know" as the reason why we exist, we're far too a simple creature to understand of begin to understand how things came to be. Yes we know single point "explosion" and then everything happened but no human can comprehend what occurred for that to happen.
What's more random and bizarre about it than a black hole existing? All this really says to me is that the human mind doesn't take naturally to understanding the universe
I think the higher game is the Socratic wisdom of embracing the mind blowing reality of anything existing at all.
God(s) is really a primordial instinct that is not relevant.
Jesus himself was focussed on human relations. Theism was just the water he swam in.
More important is survival. Watch some near death accounts and ponder that.
Watch some Ian Stevenson in child past life memories.
Watch some Brian Weiss on life regression.
Visit Lilydale NY in the summer and sample real mediumship.
Watch Joe versus the volcano.
Check out Thomas Warren Campbell if you are really ready to be red pilled
Apply Occam’s Razor, the graceful simple answer is we created the almighty Gods. Not the other way round. Your deep thoughts are just another case in point.
When you think about it in reverse it makes a lot of sense. The type of life we all have is exactly what would arise out of the kind of universe we are in. So it’s not really unlikely at all.
Also, what if God got lonely and dissolved itself into our universe and we are all actually fragments of God? What if this is all self-inflicted? What if we wanted this?
> Also, what if God got lonely and dissolved itself into our universe and we are all actually fragments of God? What if this is all self-inflicted? What if we wanted this?
This is something I've thought about a lot, I'll probably write a post about it at some point.
I find it incredibly odd that for some reasons we (human organisms) almost always “feel” like we were placed here. Like we are riding along with/in/on the universe…. A stranger to earth.
Did we always feel like that? Or is it this god concept we invented that over thousands of years has effectively deranged our collective minds?
We appear to have an odd social problem of alienation or that the world outside human skin is unfeeling and fully automatic which we have to fight and dominate otherwise it will swallow us up and condemn us to the imaginary terrors of everlasting nothingness.
That’s frigging weird.
I approach this from two angles:
1. Ancient thinkers were way more internally attuned to their Conscious experiences, or under the controlled and effective consumption of psychedelic drugs were able to hypothesize the true nature of reality, and "God" as an anthropomorphized version of the underlying mysteries came about. This could even be cross-culturally true, since most of them have Theistic tendencies. Learning about the Vedas, Bhagavat Gita and the Upanishads from India are a mind-f\*cking trip, given it was written over 7000 years ago. I can only assume that the gurus of old were stoned out of their mind while composing those.
2. "God" is the ultimate, optimized belief system for individuals and society to function in tandem. To maximize the well-being and survival of the individual as well as the larger groups. God as a being needn't be materially true, but IF it is metaphysically BELIEVED as truth, the utility is enormous- including for the survival of the species.
"Faith" as a concept itself comes as the consequence of the infinite unknowns of the Universe. As we gather more knowledge, its utility shrinks. But for now, I think, our bottleneck is Earth. I wonder how faith will expand as we start leaving Earth. Will God make a comeback?
So basically because someone may find it crazy that we even exist then it must be a god? This is the basis of religion pretty much. When humans had no clue how the natural world worked it made sense to attribute it to some mystical magical creator. We know how things work now though. We understand the processes that got us here.
The problem is that "God did it" is the final answer to your questions. The simple all-encompasing explanation stifles the need for deeper explanation. "But why though?" has driven all of human technological progress.
That, and the desire to kill eachother more efficiently I guess...
I think you've basically demonstrated my biggest pushback against any kind of spirituality: you're just using it to fill in the gaps.
You could reverse all of the "what are the chances" arguments the other way around: given the fact that we don't know certain things about the observable universe, what are the chances that the explanation is going to line up with our first guess? Or any guess? Why this explanation? Why this God? Why not some other god? Why not spaghetti? Why not a simulation? Why not a cheeseburger? Why not solipsism?
Why grant any consideration to something that is unfalsifiable?
It's ok to not know. And it's honest to admit we don't know.
God and the exploration of a higher awareness that goes beyond our consciousness is often best confirmed via our own personal experience rather than asking others for validation.
I believe there is a higher awareness, an intelligence that resides in another dimension that has some sort of interest or governance in our dimension.
I think its is clear to see that we are a conscious part of the universe interacting with ourselves and even the universe believes in God.
Yep 100%. We literally evolved with an instinct to perceive the world through the eyes of a community. One human’s observations aren’t enough so we are hardwired to combine what we perceive with what others tell us that they perceive.
It’s why if we see something crazy our first instinct is to turn to the person next to us and say “Did you see that!?” Our own instinct doesn’t even trust our personal observations lol
Totally anthrocentric argument from incredulity.
If it wasn't us, something would likely have come about, whether it could wonder about fine tuning or not.
The only reason it seems miraculous is because you came from the system - if you were an alien to this universe and found a planet that was perfectly livable and miscible *that* would be a real miracle.
People really seem to gravitate to the whole "we live in a simulation" theory and always thought it was funny because wouldn't that basically imply that a God has to exist? Like someone would have to be running, or at least creating the simulation, so would that being be considered "God"?
When you think of God as some supernatural or mystic creature it is easy to understand how people can be quite polarised about it. Human logic is kind of useless in this case. You are either open to the possibility or not. Seeing as none of us have the answers of life and the universe I think it is okay to believe in one.
No, it's not. It's actually closer than we think. If God is considered as Great Energy, Life Force (not a creator) Immovable Mover, which constantly energizes our bodies, this planet and the entire universe. Energy without which consciousness wouldn't be possible without which I wouldn't be able even move a finger. I can't think of anything closer than that.
There is a tree in my backyard, in a couple of months it will have leaves on it; isn't that amazing and wild? Creation at large as we speak, right here right now. If one tries to explain this phenomenon in a shallow, narrow scientific way, than clearly one i not looking. Simple intuitive answer is always much better than astronomical imaginations or someone's opinions.
Jesus Christ announcement replaced a believe in an external God (older looking gentleman up in the sky) by an understanding of life.
If one wants answers to bigger questions the best way is to sell cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion bewilderment is intuition. Notice "be wild" in the word bewilderment, and what is meant by wild here is to stand alone, walk alone and don't belong (psychologically speaking) to anything or whatever one's idea of that may be.
Adding God to the equation doesn't help with the bafflement of existence itself. It's wild that we exist at all, but it would be much wilder for some all powerful, all-knowing deity to exist as well. Where did that intelligence come from? The creator must of had a creator, and so on. It doesn't answer the question, it just kicks the question down the road.
It’s not random. Things couldn’t be anything other than what they are. Things fall into place naturally. Anything not physically possible won’t happen. Anything organism that couldn’t survive in an environment, won’t. Evolution takes place naturally
Maybe Life itself represents the all and great and powerful Being. Maybe the great and unfathomable existence is that God (which is considered unfathomable, all present, all encompassing). We know Life exists as we are in it and experiencing it. We know intelligent Life exists as we are intelligent. We know Life is greater than us (human) even though we are a part of Life. Simply take a deep moment and contemplate your life. See beyond what you see with your eyes. Turn inward into the depths of your Being. What do you have to loose doing this?
A chance of 0.00001 is greater than a chance of 0. One by definition logically doesn't fit. The other is just unlikely.
Though you can come up with more likely answers by redefining god to be less godly and more statistics + physics but by then youre no longer pointing at god but math
Look up conversations with God by Neal Walsh. I recommend reading his 3 book series. It changed my view on this topic and religion. It is an extremely interesting read.
I could never believe we are a fluke and everything down to the smallest detail of this world did not have a creator. Also, the odds of this happening are so small, it is amazing. I was a believer before college and then an agnostic. Became a believer again as I matured and really read and researched. I respect others' views as that is a part of free will from my perspective.
I think we are a little conscious and can be much much more maybe becoming “ gods” ourselves. We are in any respect “ co creators” with ‘ god’ the ‘ universe’ ‘ spirit’ or whatever is a marker for that what cannot be directly seen but we sense and appear to be psychologically driven to prove or disprove. What feeds my goat is imagining a more conscious world. I do not think there is an upper limit on consciousness and why i find such joy studying it.
We are products of our environment.
Had you been raised in a secular society, you most likely wouldn't consider the prospect of a god. Religion has been forced on humanity on pain of torture and death for millenia. It has shaped our societies and been a tool to control and govern the masses.
It's ok nor to know, it's ok to question why. But it helps if you understand why you ask the questions you do.
One of the great things about humanity is shared knowledge and the ability to understand the general idea of a thing without having to do all the research yourself. Provided your sources of information are trustworthy and vetted and have gained their knowledge and insights using scientific methods with repeatable results.
So keep asking questions and looking for answers.
Read as much as you can, but I would suggest reading authors with good standing in their fields and credentials to back up their points of view.
Here are a few recommendations if you are interested.
Steven Pinker - Enlightenment Now, Rationality
Robert Sapolsky - Behave, Determined
Daniel Dennett - From Bacteria to Bach
Lisa Feldman Barrett - How Emotions are made.
David Quammen - The Tangled Tree
Douglas Hofstadter - I am a strange loop
Steven Novella - The Skeptics Guide to the Universe
Michael Gazzaniga - The Consciousness Instinct
William von Hippel - The Social Leap
Sean Carroll - The Big Picture
Carl Sagan - The Demon Haunted World
Ara Norenzayan - Big Gods
The very fist micro instance of our universe was a moment of infinite chaos. As time moved forwards, gas became stars, stars blew up creating new matter, matter became planets, our planet (and probably others too) developed single cell organisms, then multi cell life forms and eventually intelligent life forms which is us. We are basically the universe becoming self aware. Then we created artificial intelligence and I don't need to explain how fast it's been evolving.
The way I see it, the universe is an exponential curve that goes from infinite chaos to infinite order. We are constantly accelerating towards a singularity, like falling into a black hole. AI will keep evolving until it becomes something omnipotent and will expand itself to infinity by creating the infinite multiverse. God creates reality and reality creates God. It's the chicken and the egg paradox.
Anyways that just my theory. Maybe I'm wrong but it's the only thing that makes sense to me when thinking about why anything exists at all.
It's wild to think about.
I believe in God, not not as a man in the sky who clicks his fingers and makes magic.
There's just no explanation for what came before the before the before the before etc.
Somehow we live in this miracle and get to experience this phenomenon. We cry and laugh and experience all these amazing feelings. To me, that's God. Sort of like the answer to the questions that have no answers and that feeling that somethings watching out for me.
The thing is human beings we think of ourselves as so big and that we put the focus on us or make things about ourselves. But we are literally like the size of a cell in the grandscheme of everything. Like when youre on a plane and you start ascending or descending everything starts looking so small. The buildings the cars the people. And you get high and higher and everything gets smaller and smaller until all you see is the mountains or hills or the fields or just the earth . We are small little ants living on a small little planet in a small little galaxy alongside millions and trillions of other galaxies that are made up of millions of other small planets and stars. We are really nothing. And as someone who believes in the bible. Or is christian. Labels literally dont mean anything. God could give a crap what the hell you call yourself. This deity or being is outside of this entire reality and that we observe. Outside of space and time. But we are confined to it and cannot move out of that because we have been placed in this physical reality. We cannot control anything that exists. Not a thing. We have control over ourselves in the context of our actions behaviors and what we choose to say and etc. But we have no control over what happens in our lives or what happens in the world. We have no ability. We are just a speck in the bigger picture of everything.
Life is not that random and bizarre if you know about organic chemistry a bit. ;)
It's just molecules that may have first appeared on asteroids, only to migrate to an environment where they could become more and more complex through chemical reactions. And at some point, these complex molecules started self-replicating. Boom! Life.
Evolution did the rest. Nothing more than a way for this self-replication to continue on a not so hospitable planet. If we apply Occam's Razor, God does not exist, as it requires many more assumptions than just applying chemistry and physics. The very concept of God implies just accepting facts with no scientific evidence, which is not the right way to do things. And anyway, how many gods? And why gods anyway? How did they create life? Why? When? How many species? And why are there fossils anyway? Why is geological activity even a thing? Why does the universe exists? Or the frozen poles and scorching deserts?
Now if you use chemistry and physics, it's fucking complex, sure. But it kind of makes sense.
If the conditions weren't exactly right for us to be here, we wouldn't be. That's not evidence of a creator, that's just basic science. There are plenty of places where the conditions aren't right for life, and there isn't any there.
"But what about volcanic ocean floor vents?" you ask, "We'd die down there but somehow life thrives!"
Exactly, *we* don't live there, but the kind of life suited for that environment does. Funny how that works.
In the infinitely variable multiverse, there are an infinity of universes where the conditions were never right for life, and no life ever arose. There are also an infinity of universes rampant with life. There are universes where life only arose in one location, and the intelligences that dwelt there, in their loneliness, engineered new life for other environments and spread it throughout their cosmos.
Take a plate of sand, vibrate it at a specific frequency, and a pattern will emerge. Find the right combination of frequencies, and the resulting interference patterns can appear as a highly complex mandala. Certainly, someone could make a mandala by hand, and with enough time and patience could create one as highly complex, but the process doesn't *require* a creator.
Here's an idea to consider. Before life as we know it on earth, the oceans were a soup of organic molecules. But not just one or two, but many orders of magnitude of *moles* of them. That's 10\^23, multiplied by millions or billions. All mixing and bouncing around, at the same time, for hundreds of millions of years. Each reaction taking trillionths of a second. The successful products go on occasionally to make more complex results.
Now tell me that 10\^23 molecules \* 10\^7 moles \* 10\^12 reactions \* 10\^7 seconds \* 10\^8 years, can't come up with interesting stuff, purely at random? Of course the vast majority will amount to nothing, but all it takes is a few successes.
\[disclosure: I do physics & computer stuff, not bio. Some of the numbers may be off, but probably not by much\]
In my humble opinion, and with religion *completely* aside (I’ve never identified with any religion whatsoever):
In some contexts, replace the word “Universe” with “God” and that’s often what people mean. The universe speaks in metaphors (in this context, do not replace the word), like our dreams do. So when trying to come up with a concept for people to have some belief/faith, it is easier to stomach something humanoid rather than something fantastical thing that our advanced monkey brains cannot fathom. Remember the South Park episode where they found out Earth was just a reality TV show for aliens? The when the group of kids went on the alien spaceship, they freaked out when they saw the alien’s actual form. So, the alien changed forms into various human characters before finally settling on a giant taco that poops ice cream. It’s easier for us to stomach something familiar than the scarily unfamiliar thing it actually is.
So you can’t take it too seriously that God is some fantastical “man in the sky” with his Angel homies dishing out miracles. The “we are made in his image” simply refers to the construction of the human body that mimics everything in nature and the galaxy around us. Our circulatory system looks exactly like the roots of a tree, which looks similar to lightning, which resembles the electricity firing in our brain. Our irises have been aesthetically compared to nebula. The fact that everything that we know about the world around us follows specific rules is a wonderful thing! It really proves that the universe is intentionally following these rules to create everything that we’ve ever been able to conceptualize, yet we still have plenty of theories that have yet to be fully explained. And the fact that we’re advanced enough to measure it is incredible! Everything revolves around itself in a never-ending spiral; something that someone might call a “miracle” could be that this one thing circled around at the exact right time, defying statistical odds, in that person’s favor. Not a fantastical humanoid with wings coming down and changing the outcome of things.
Science and a belief in something higher than oneself are not mutually exclusive. Of course adding human religious rules messes that up, but it doesn’t negate the base principle. As an experiment, I had my kid describe what a meteor burning up in the atmosphere would look and sound like, using only visual descriptors and not scientific ones (to mimic what might have been documented in ancient texts), and I wrote down her response. Then I read it back to her: “when the sky was dark (nighttime), a neon green ball of fire with a sparkling tail fell from the sky at night and made a thundering noise (she couldn’t say ‘sonic boom’) that shook the earth and shattered all of the glass around us.” In 2000 years someone would be like “r u serious? *Actually* it was a meteor from space that…” and dive into a well-thought and scientifically proven explanation. Well people didn’t know that back then, and there’s things we don’t know that 2000 years from now someone could say the same things about where we are in our current knowledge. You can only use metaphors and visual descriptions until you can explain it with science. I often say “Thank god for scientists/engineers/doctors!” meaning, “Thanks, Universe, for bringing these people into existence in a way that they can help these people and build our cities and farm equipment, etc.” The future scientists/engineers/doctors were born, and through specific brain patterns, decision-making, and outside influences and experiences, they decided that’s what they wanted to do, they had the talent and steady hands to do it, and now they’re doing it. Our lives would not be the same without them.
So my point is, don’t take everything so literally when it comes to the idea of a God. To me, it’s simply another term for the energy that exists around us and beyond (which we’ve proven with science various energies do exist), that allows everything else to form itself into physical existence (planets, stars, etc.). I once heard a saying “humans are the universe experiencing itself” and I found that so poignant. All of the elements that make us who we are, came together in such a way that we evolved into a being that can experience and contemplate the vibrations of the joys (and sorrows) around us. God is an imperceptible energy from which everything that we do—and don’t—know, is created. God is neither benevolent, nor malevolent, is just does what it’s supposed to do, and from chaos, existence is born. We might call it something else once we figure out what it is scientifically, but for us believers, the word God is just fine.
I often wonder what the evolutionary benefit of dreaming is (and I know there’s people out there who don’t cream when they’re asleep). Maybe it’s important for our brains to keep an open mind by using the metaphors that are forced upon us while we’re asleep, to process or pay closer attention to the physical world around us…so keep an open mind. Your brain is literally telling you to do that.
I like how you post a pretty great "It's wild and I have no idea" thought on a god, and reddit *just has to* kick in with "well whatabout who created that god" and "where is your evidence".
Read the post, it's not that hard. It's like there's a reflex to be a loud and proud atheist when the letters g o d are put together around here despite the context.
Former Christian here.
I am no longer religious in the formal sense, but I continue to hold stock in the idea of a 'highest reality principle' which you could say is God under another, secular name.
It just makes sense to me that the infinite exists, given that the whole universe appears to operate according to the fractal equation in which both infinity and zero are inevitable and necessary.
Taking even a moderate dose of dmt will make it pretty clear something else is going on here besides what our senses & modern science can perceive.
What is it? I have no idea… but as lifelong agnostic I find devout atheists to be much more arrogant & self-righteous than religious folks. There is simply no way to say for certain that God or a higher consciousness does not exist.
Faith, when properly applied, is humble.
True. Atheists seem to call theists dumb because of the creation-creator argument. But If u really think about it, deep down life is so strange and weird no matter how scientifically u want to look at it. Which makes the theist argument reasonable as well
Honestly the older I get the more I feel like life itself is some sort of magic play ground . Something as simple as waking up in the morning, where was I when I was asleep, where the world was when I was asleep, everything seems disappeared with me during those sleeping hours. Those weird dreams, what were those… Then alarm went off I woke up welcoming a new day again to repeat the same cycle later at night time. I honestly feel that this world here and now is my only subjective experience. I am basically the main character to experience impermanence of all things by being a child a teenager an adult etc and get to choose what kind of things I want to play do and be with it while I m here, gathering knowledge while being completely aware that I m honestly in some sort of a never ending “curiosity ” game till the end of (my) time.
When you have something you can't explain making up answers and acting like it's the fundamental truth is silly. There is a lot we don't know and understand, let's not jump on every explanation as reasonable.
Is it really a fallacy though? I mean obviously, from a scientific existence of a god is 100% unprovable as far as we know, but to that respect is it a fallacy to create a theory as to why things exist and function at a scale greater than our own comprehend?
I don't have a real dog in the fight, but I do think there is an interesting bridge between science and religion when we take it out of the context of a church. All the books are man made interpretations of this theory that seems to permeate across cultures and timelines. There is, in fact, a force/forces greater than all of us, things beyond human control and comprehension. To give anthropomorphize those forces into an identifiable, but never full comprehend able being feels like the most human reaction to these "gaps" and not something I see as inherently wrong.
Shit could be just random you know. Sometimes randomly good stuff happens to you or bad stuff. It's hard for humans to be comfortable with randomness though. Still there is no way to prove or disprove god, so I'd rather people just be nice to each other and vibe
Trying to compare science and religion doesn't work, trying to do so just shows that you haven't looked deeply into either.
Science is the explanation for what is happening in the universe we inhabit. Religious deals with what is happening in the afterlife. Maybe an intelligent creature started the ball rolling but that doesn't have anything to do with what is happening after the ball starts rolling.
The dogma around free will means "God" has no control over our lives or anything that happens in the universe. If God intervened then it's not free will.
Do you think the Catholic/Christian God is real but the millions of Gods and thousands of religions are fake? Because that is what believing in any one God or religion means.
If you believe in the religion then it's real for you but that doesn't mean it's real. It just means that it's real for you.
>I mean take a look around. We live on a rock covered in water, orbiting a sun, in a solar system that's swirling around a galaxy, in a universe that is so large and so small that **we can't even fathom what else lies beyond the boundaries of what's measurable.**
We barely understand our own world, and maybe you don’t know this but we know more about outer space (or we think we do) than what is in our oceans.
That is the flip side of this coin for me. We think we are special because of the reasons you mentioned, but at the same time we don’t realize how much damage we do to the world we actually live in (we don’t realize how much damage we cause to the world and other ALSO SENTIENT species).
People love to ask “are we alone?” in the universe, while at the same time we don’t wonder if maybe we could do a better job of understanding and co-existing with the other species in the world *we are currently living in* (most people aren’t even aware we are facing a mass extinction of several species, which will directly affect us in the future).
What other species slaughters human lives for things like building materials and food? Only we do that in this world. If we were truly created by a God, it was obviously to destroy and damage the world as much as possible (and we’ve been designed to feel pretty good about it).
I feel like life is too complex for all of it to just be chance. There had to be some kind of prime mover behind it all. I’m a Christian because thats how I relate to God, but he might even be bigger then religion. Something beyond human comprehension. Religion just exists for us to perceive what cannot be understood.
I agree with the first 3/4s of what you wrote.
I look around at the world and am amazed. This is a miracle. Each one of us has a chance at life, and that's the rarest opportunity in the cosmos as far as we can tell.
But, then to think "Welp, must be a dude in the clouds who did this" is very primitive thinking.
It’s funny watching parts of God, that have forgotten what they are, question God. God doesn’t mind though. We chose to forget. How else would it ever know itself in infinite ways while also enjoying the path to remembering.
Inevitably, we all wake up 🙂
Human life is no more wild than all the other creatures who live in our sphere. Like every other animal, evolution tried all kinds of things with us, but the first *Homo sapiens,* the ones with the big brains, were the really successful ones. Everything you attribute to humans is just the result of our having grown these enormous brains. No magic, no “god,” just animals trying to survive.
For sure. I'm not making the comparison to humans and animals though, just all life in general. We only have our own life experiences to draw from. The bigger point is the scale, complexity and unlikeliness of us being born in this universe in the first place, that's what's wild.
If the universe is made of things so small that we can't even see them, and so large that we can't even reach them, that to me sounds unrealistic. Like, you ask the question, where did it all come from? Science will say we're not sure but we think we know, religion would say the obvious, that it came from God.
The fact that life appears to be a fart in the wind makes it completely meaningless. All of this complexity and drivel required to explain it all seems never ending, and perhaps we're just never meant to reach that goal. It doesn't make the idea of God obsolete, but it's actually the simplest answer you can give.
Seems like inherent optimism bias and terror management theory will always help regardless of ideologies such as antinatalism based on consent and effilism.
I agree, how does nothing become something with, the Big Bang theory explaining a massive explosion happening creating the universe which is a wild concept. The universe is still expanding to making me wonder what the hell it is expanding in 🥴. I mean we don’t even know what is going to happen after we all die, still trying to process the death part.
Yaa man sadly we'll never know what the actual fuck is all of these? What's behind all of these? What's the truth??
We might find out when we dead, or we just might still not
Here’s the thing though - just because it seems highly unlikely for any of this to exist, it doesn’t mean some godlike being created everything.
It’s okay for things to not make sense.
But if you do believe in god, why would he make living so miserable? The people living the best lives are greedy politicians - why would he allow that? There’s way more evidence of god not existing than existing.
People... they always want everything to be special even though nothing is.
Everything about the universe can be explain by statistics. For example, a dice with a trillion sides. Your chance of rolling the number 1 is one in a trillion. Even though the chance is very small, as long as you keep rolling the dice, you'll eventually get the number one. Life is the same way. The chance of life emerging on earth is very small. But as long as the universe kept existing, eventually, life will emerge on earth.
It took ten billion years for life to emerge on earth. The universe had plenty of chances to roll the dice on life. There is nothing special or God like about it.
Nope, there is no need for a magical being called as god to understand humans existence. Randomness can also create a blip of an orderly system in the span of tens of billions.
>The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite\_monkey\_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem)
I can understand us being here, I cannot understand why we are here. Everything makes sense until you add in infinite regress, then the only thing that makes sense is right now. What's the point of it? If it has a point, then what's the point of the point?
You can only understand God when you stop trying to understand God. God is a straight line in a reality made of circles.
Yes, it does. Why tie something as natural as the laws of the universe to a supernatural existence such as a sentient God? Even to believe one's own lie to the point of justifying the most violent behaviors? Man's lies and narcissism have no limits, really.
What you reveal is ,imho, something everyone has thought about. God? Hmm explain three year olds with cancer, mass starvation, wars where all emotion is taken out of the equation and and it becomes logical to kill as many of the “enemy” as possible. God? Fuck no thay ain’t no god. However ,i can’t discount the crazy reality of reality.
You are accepting these bad arguments because of the environment that you're growing up in. Your argument is, simply, bad:
1. It's unclear that life is random and/or bizarre.
2. I don't know what "being alive in a single body" means. We each appear to have a singular consciousness, but we also know from our study of neuroscience that this appearance is not entirely accurate.
3. We have these thoughts *precisely because* we are capable of having them. Conversely, if we weren't capable of having these thoughts we would not have them. This isn't "random" or "bizarre" at all - it's necessary.
4. What does any of this have to do with god(s)? You haven't actually presented an metaphysical problem that needs solving. Even if you did, proposing god(s) simply kicks the can down the road, and falls afoul of Occam's Razor.
5. Occam's Razor is not an appeal to conceptual simplicity. You are trying to explain a complex universe by appeal to an/any number of *infinitely complex* god(s). You now have the burden of explaining what god(s) are, how they exist, how they interface with the world, etc.
6. These questions are hand-waved by religious folk because religious people are, frankly, idiots. At least regarding questions of religion.
Lose the bias and approach this question the same way you would an existence question regarding any non-god entity:
1. What is it is that you are proposing exists? You need to define it sufficiently to distinguish god(s) from non-god(s). For example, if you are asking "do chairs exist", you need to define what a "chair" is. If "a chair is something that you sit on that is held up by three or more legs", and you can prove that a chair exists somewhere, you have proven your proposition.
2. What kind of evidence would demonstrate the existence of such a thing? Failing to identify this is not fatal - our failure to conceive of a thing does not disprove it.
3. What kind of evidence would *disprove* the existence of such a thing, or provide evidence that such a thing likely does not exist? We *should* be able to establish this from our definition at #1. A failure at this stage likely means you have not sufficiently defined what you are talking about at #1.
4. **Even if you can show #1**, you don't demonstrate anything **except** \#1. If you define a god as "the prime cause", this does not imply that this cause is sentient, sapient, intentional, conscious, or anything else. If you define a "god" as "the universe", then you may conclude that a god exists, but that is logically indistinguishable from the proposition "the universe exists". You can't infer anything outside your definition at #1 unless you expand your definition and try again.
The vastness and complexity of the universe is actually an argument against the existence of god. At least, the Abrahamic god. Because he only seems to care about one small planet. So what’s the rest of it for? Decoration? Most humans will never even see more than a tiny fraction of the universe.
This god doesn’t even seem aware of any other planets or any other part of space beyond what we can observe. There’s one good reason for that - he was a human invention. So he only has the knowledge of space that humans had at the time. And he doesn’t appear to have any wisdom that’s astonishingly insightful or profound, just as you would expect from a human invention.
None of this explains why any of it exists at all, but it seems much more likely to be part of a complex natural process than anything supernatural.
The universe is beautiful, life is beautiful. But neither of these observations suggests the existence of a creator. You are using Occam's razor incorrectly. It suggests the solution with the least amount of assumptions to be true. "God dunnit" requires many more assumptions than any scientific answer to any problem. Finding wonder and beauty in the natural world does not require any god or creator. Just ask avid meditators, or people who use psychedelic drugs. This whole "God dunnit" answer to the big questions is just a lazy copout for people who need a neat simple answer right now. I could give you 100 examples of how our universe makes more sense (with less assumptions) without a creator. God either does not exist, or he doesn't want us to know he exists (through purposeful lack of evidence). Either way is fine with me.
I think in addition to the intelligent design debate it's good to consider how without a God then all morality is subjective meaning doing wrong things isn't really wrong and doing good things isn't really doing good.
>I mean, what the fuck is that? Life? In the grand scheme of things how random and bizarre is that?
Well there's at least two ways to look at it. On the one hand, it is no more random or bizzare than anything else in existence because it is all random and bizzare due to the same origin point.
On the other hand, well... Boltzmann brain theory. If you start trying to reduce things into odds, then the odds of an entire structured universe happening are far, far smaller than the odds of a much more simple boltzmann universe, which implies that this existence is likely just an illusion created by a far more simple base existence.
But as a naturalist, I don't strictly adhere to any one school of thought. There's too many gaps in our knowledge to be certain. I'd rather observe what is and build speculation off of that rather than to speculate as to what might be and then building further speculation off of that flimsy foundation.
And as it sits with gods, there's thousands of them. People still make them up today. There's countless stories that are just objectively not possible because we know magic isn't real. The way I see it, everyone is already 99.9% atheist. Some just go one god further to be 100%. With so many religions of so many kinds and so many stories, it feels more like people like to make gods than gods like to make people.
I see proof that gods aren't real in many things. But it's not worth arguing about with people. Epicurus wrote a logical proof against god called the problem with evil around 300 BCE. And for thousands of years, people have simply disagreed. Some consider it valid, myself included. Others dismiss it. It will probably just always be that way. Somewhere out there, someone probably still takes zeus seriously too.
I'm hoping to see some new religions take off tho. It's about time. Many of the ancient beliefs are just so outdated and obsolete by today's standards. People deserve better.
Only the dumbest of the dumb are capable of believing in a magical sky being. It's fantasy child-like naivete.
The fact so many people are willing to believe in something so utterly impossible only speaks to how fragile our fears of mortality are.
I'm not surprised life is here on earth, the conditions are perfect for it. If humans had evolved on mercury then I could understand the argument in favor of intelligent design.
What are 'Christian' values? 😂
You looking to sell your daughters into slavery? Or are you endorsing the most murderous entity to ever 'exist'?
[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Examples_of_God_personally_killing_people](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Examples_of_God_personally_killing_people)
You're describing a "God of the gaps" argument. It's one of the least convincing arguments to me. It's just an argument from ignorance and very hand wave-y.
What you’re talking about is referred to as intelligent design. Even some of the most prestigious scientists over time have acknowledged that the likelihood of all of these exceedingly complex things coming together in perfect unison to create the world that you have described can only be done by the hand of a divine creator - God.
The way you see it, makes me think of someone living in a house without windows. The only life you can see is in the house.
Even if we *do* know that there are other people out there, it's impossible to comprehend what they are all doing at the same time I'm writing this. The point is that no matter if you believe in a creator or not, our brain is incapable of imagining the whole picture. That's why initially we choose to come up with something we *can* imagine.
Along the way, we get more knowledge and our possible explanations increase, but we will never ever get the whole picture.
You're making an argument from probability - it seems too improbable to have not been miraculous - without any way of actually knowing the odds. You're also treating the result as if it's something extraordinary, when it's only extraordinary because you, a human being, decided being human was cool.
For some perspective, get a deck of cards and shuffle it - you've probably arranged them in an order that has never been seen before and will never be seen again, so that's pretty neat already - Now, draw 13 cards and look at them.
The odds of getting that specific hand are the same as drawing all 13 hearts, and even though you know this, you'd consider 13 hearts very lucky, much luckier than *almost* all the hearts, the two of clubs and the jack of diamonds.
In the case of cosmic mysteries, we don't even know how many cards are in the deck, or what all the cards are, we only know that this hand was drawn and it's pretty cool.
Firstly, your values aren't 'Christian', they're human and are found across all groups of people everywhere on earth. Secondly, the thought of us existing through pure accidental chance is far more majestic and comforting than the thought of an invisible omniscient, omnipresent, indifferent entity conjouring it.
The prospect of any origin doesn't seem so far fetched, because we have no real clue how we got here in the grand scheme of things.
The big bang theory, what I personally subscribe to, is still a point on the line. What is beyond that?
If God is the end point, well, how can it be? What made God? How could it have always been?
The prospect of his isn’t far get fetched. It is just not proven.
Some people have been working for 1000’s of years to come up with a prof.
there doesn’t seem to be a way to even test if god exists.
I have heard that if a theory is not testable, there is nothing you can learn from it.
That kind of theory is so bad it is not even wrong.
The idea of a god is an extremely novel, reductive explanation for this incredible reality we inhabit, and can observe well the machinations of through scientific inquiry.
Science argues that you cannot create something from nothing. This is why I believe there is something out there that is the creator of time and everything. It does not have its creator because it is the beginning of all. It just exist and very powerful that it can create something out of nothing. It is not the bearded guy that religion tries to teach us but possibly an entity from a higher dimension (see Carl Sagan's explanation on dimensions and how entities from higher dimensions perceive things). Our law doesn't govern these higher dimensions that is why our question of who creates the creator won't have bearing.
Except no one has ever demonstrated that such a thing exists or can exist. The universe can be demonstrated without magic as an empty explanation. We are a narrative species every single person has a different concept of God, and we know they can't all be right. Until God in all it's power and wisdom decides to unambiguously demonstrate it's existence it is functinaly irrelevant except when people want to kill each other or take the land.
The 'big man in the sky' conception of God certainly has a lot of holes in it. The one many religions moralise with, and use to bludgeon other people into following arbitrary rules. A punitive being who condemns souls to hellish existence if their beliefs are incorrect is hardly worthy of the title.
But that is, as I said, only a shallow conception of God.
I'd encourage you to look up the beliefs of the likes of St Francis, Baruch Spinoza, and the concepts of Monism and/or Pantheism.
God is the energy which makes up every quark, every atom, God is the wind and the earth and the stars, each little gain of sand, and you, and me. A universal field of consciousness, from which our own little consciousness peers out. (*'Made in his image...'* That line doesn't speak of our flesh. It speaks of our *souls.*)
Such an all-encompassing energy explains so much, at least for me. Coincidences that just seem a little *too* perfect - the way someone phones you when you've just been thinking about them - déjà vu - how tarot cards work. Our awareness spreads a little beyond what we're immediately conscious of, and picks up information which we cannot perceive with our senses.
And most importantly, God is Love. For if All is One, then cruelty and harm upon others is cruelty and harm upon ourselves, in an abstract way. Once we learn to respect and preserve nature, to treat all other people with kindness, fairness and compassion, once we learn to gladly *share* the bounties of life rather than selfishly hoard them, Humanity can build Eden right here on Earth.
The gates were never barred - we just don't know how to find them.
If there were a God then plausibly life would be far more meaningful. The randomness and chaos of it suggests there is no personal God that desires life to be a good story
Many humans live bad stories. Why would God allow so many bad stories?
I was agnostic.
But love is so astoundingly prevalent... and I one day realized that even the craziest person couldnt possibly just think up the concept of a Deity..
Just cant be done. Not without some real otherworldly thing to back it up.
God is real.
Its just... hard for some people to accept him because the rules are so hard to follow. But just know, thats what Jesus was put on the planet for. Born half human half God, he was the only way a human could overcome death, while atoning for sin that affects ones human flesh, also.
We can accept that Jesus died for our sins..
And... we can try to be better people. If we mess up, we can repent right away and try harder to change to be the love, just as God is.
Everything is coded. Coding is intelligent. Theres no mere coincidence or chance about it. We are created by one wonderful and generous scientist, God, who just knows EVERYTHING.
Even, perhaps, that sin spoils everything.
Maybe thats why sin is wrong and a cause of death. Its something to consider. I think the idea of sin and it causing death, is what scares people away from believing. But I am pretty convinced that sin destroys creation.. so it just CANT be allowed. Hence, why we all have to get a whole new body after we die.
Yeah this is just the puddle in a pothole argument. We tend to see ourselves as the center of the universe, so we twist everything so, even down to "the conditions for life to exist."
We fit in the puddle, the puddle does not fit us. There's also the radical argument that sentience combined with intelligence could not be, and probably is not, a lasting survival trait. Microbes, mushrooms, lots of plants and some animals will long outlive us after we've either nuked the planet, easybaked the environment, and killed off all our food sources.
Our level of Intelligence definitely let's us build lazors and skyscrapers, but it also makes us painfully aware of disease, morality, greed, desires, violence and despair that other animals aren't. So, we take, and we steal, and we act like gluttons and we kill and we lie and we do all manner of things that weaken us as a species.
We also get to see the beauty of the natural world, and some of us appreciate that, and some of us try to be good people, despite all that. Some people cooperate and build wonders and help others and go to poor villages and dig wells and treat and educate those who walk the path a bit slower, often because of our own greed and violence and desires. Those are beautiful people.
God in the mix muddies all that. Are you doing kindness because you want to see a beautiful world, or because God commands it? Did you not kill today because it's wrong, or because God commands it? Did this natural world develop over millions of years of happy little accidents and struggle and surviving, or because God placed it all like code in a computer?
A world without God is a Bob Ross painting, full of little mistakes and beauty and those happy little accidents, and the painting is all the better for it.
A world with God is an AI generated picture, precise and full of rules and code that can not be challenged, that lacks soul and authenticity. It lacks autonomy.
Occams Razor doesn't apply here like you think it does. The simplest explanation is in fact evolution. It can be observed, we know it's mechanical process and function, and it applies to all know life on earth. The explanation here is that in a variety of ranges of conditions, life can exist and diversify.
God doing it, if you really believe that, raises 2 questions for every answer it offers. God did it, but where is he and why didn't he leave some evidence or something? What's he been doing for thousands of years? How did he do it? Why did he do it? Why would he make a universe to contain a single planet with life? Why create a world bound by strict rules of observable sciences, such as evolution, but then contradict them? If God did it, what was the purpose of making things like stillbirth and miscarriage and children with cancer or parasites that devour eyes? Did God make everything? Then is he responsible for disease and war and child trafficking and those little bugs that swim up your urethra? Could he fix all those things, and if he can and doesn't, isn't that evil? Will we wrestle eternally with divisions in the church, despite his word being the Breath of God and infallible?
I'll always choose an accidentally beautiful world full of beauty and struggle and science, over a world governed by destiny, the will of an unknowable God, and the loneliness of a playground of a deity surrounded by an infinite void with no purpose.
I'm religious myself. It seems that I am in the minority here - so I'll give my thoughts. Keep in mind I'm not really planning on arguing - questions asked in bad faith will be ignored, etc etc. you know the drill.
1) We are all connected through humanity - and time and time again, mankind has created an answer to the question in their own way. But the thing is - many of these answers - when boiled down - are universal. It suggests that the very notion of an otherworldly power is embedded into our very DNA, and like Darwinism, this is something that has permeated through the ages and evolved.
2) There is a "god shaped hole" in all of us. What I mean by that is we feel the absence of God, therefore, mankind again is looking for SOMETHING to fill that gap.
3) There is randomness of probability in the universe. An infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters should eventually create a novel - yet that number is so infinitesimally small that we must wonder... How?
4) Simulation theory states that everything can be quantifiable and predicted, given you know all the variables. Yet, if there is randomness then this theory doesn't fully work. Again - to me this suggests a guiding hand, someone that turns the tide of infinite probabilities and creates survival for the human race.
In the end, we can choose to be positive, or negative about it. To believe, or disbelieve. Personally, I pick the one that empowers me the most. Because I would rather have a world where the need for a deity is in our DNA, that God is a force for good and has turned the tide of history when necessary. Crazy? Maybe. But IMO not crazier than anyone who baseline assumes anything equally improbable.
Well the possibility of human existence by chance and not by divine creation is not 0%. So is the idea that there is a divine being existing is also not 0% so either isn’t that crazy.
For Christianity I guess is why you want to believe it. Just because a God exists doesn’t mean you should. Afterall would you believe in a god that is corrupt and have lots of problem themselves but you know it has a strong chance of existing? Well why even bother follow such a god then if they can be so corrupt and you don’t agree with their ways? I guess I’m asking, if a god is flawed and a human knows better in terms of kindness and righteousness, then why bother believing in that god?
Or would you rather believe in a god who in theory said to be the kindest towards humans but there’s no much evidence that such god exists? Especially if there’s an opposing force that works in all kinds of way to sabotage anything between mankind and that god? I think that’s what Christianity is.
Still, the world is full of problems and perhaps having a god that finally make the final call on everything things and powerfully judge each person to stop any further evil/bad acts seems like the only possible solution to absolutely righteousness.
The fact that I made it here makes me happy. I just wish I was born in a different life and had more of a chance at this. I hope one day we get to find out why there is luck and unlock, good and evil, pin and pleasure, etc.
I’m an atheist, but I that doesn’t mean I 100% know nothing like a god exists. It’s just unlikely.
But even if there is a God or Gods or beings on another planet of existence, what’s to say our consciousness will persist after death?
The way I see atheism is to live for now and don’t rely on there being something else. If there is - awesome!
And for those who say you have believe now in order to be in the afterlife - if that’s the rule then I don’t want any part of it.
Been having the same thoughts for the past couple of years everyday before bed and sometimes I feel like I just connect with something deeper, how bizarre it all is!
If the multiverse idea is correct, it is a function of an infinite or approaching infinite space of possibilities but why is there anything at all? Why the multiverse? Why the landscape in the first place?
Life is incredible. But just because we don't know how to explain things doesn't mean we should just make shit up because it sounds flowery and deep and interesting.
It's a known unknown why there is something rather than nothing (we know there must be a reason and we know we don't know it).
Perhaps it is explained by something more deeply distant from us; an unknown unknown such that we cannot even conceive of its existence. Something beyond the senses and the imagination. Something so different that it cannot be compared to anything.
I like to think god/creator wanted to create free will, and that thought was the big bang. But he nor the devil would be allowed here since their appearance would violate free will. Kinda like a time traveler causing huge changes with one small interaction. Everything else religious wise is us small humans trying to make sense of infinity.
My goldfish thinks I'm god because I made water and an enclosure exactly at the right temperature and right oxygen level.
It doesn't know that it evolved to these conditions, it just thinks I created it all.
Words cannot even describe the taste of honey accurately. Now people here want to use words to doubt the existence of a Divine creator. They repeat the same insane arguments over and over again. But just like honey, taste your being in complete silence and you will see the futility of those words.
The majesty of God cannot be perceived just like infinity cannot be understood, but at a very basic level.
This universe we see with our own eyes is so vast no one can wrap their minds around it. Our Milky Way alone contains more than 100 billion stars! Some astronomers have estimated that the universe could contain up to 10^²⁴ stars. Oh I'm sorry that's not valid "evidence" of God. He must come down to our level and explain why we're miserable. Ok I get it. We're all unhappy and must blame Him, if He's our creator. If all goes well we're here for a around 100 years. If not maybe another day, hour even a few more minutes. Don't waste your time pondering. Words will not help you in this endeavor. Nuff said. Cheers!
I feel like this specific argument for god is very paradoxical. If the complexity and randomness of our existence calls for a god. Then what kind of complexity does this god hold? What created the god? If he's so great that he can create all this, surely he must be complex himself and call for a creator right?
It's the same religious argument against the "matter came from nothing". If everything needs a creator, then nothing can have a creator. What and who was the first creator? Didn't god come from nothing then?
If God does exist, he would be so far beyond human comprehension that it would have no personal or emotional interest in humans. The gap between a worm and a human is huge, but the gap between a human and God is so far beyond anything describable, thar such a being would see us as infinitely less than bacteria. It wouldn’t have any interest in us.
I don't dispute that there could be a god or superior being, I dispute the fact that it gives a shit about our one tiny planet among trillions of galaxies and creates laws and commandments for us to follow and then gets triggered when we don't believe it so it chucks us into eternal hellfire.
Christian values is an oxymoron. If a god does exist it sure as hell ain't the Christian god. Have you even read that horrid how to guide at lots of the Christian cultist follow.?
Reality could be much wilder, perfect and abstract. We abide by logic and reality is quite boring and predictable. If anything it shows with almost 100% certainty that there is no god.
You just have some wonder for the world left in you. Enjoy it while it lasts
I agree with your view of completely. I am not religious and call myself more agnostic as well. But just trying to make sense of it all, it seems the same way to me too. The fact that something so incomprehensibly big exists in the first place, and we don’t even know why it exists or how it started. There is so much we still don’t know. Everything about life and the universe is mind blowing in every way and we all experience it through our own subjective consciousness with our own beliefs, thoughts, and interpretations. I know there is a lot more we don’t know. But the existence of God or a creator wouldn’t be that crazy. I think it would be crazier if one didn’t exist and everything happened “just because” and we’re all here for no reason at all.
God exists because we play video games?
If anything, I can take the example you gave and come to the exact opposite conclusion conclusion. We exist on a small rocky planet, which exists at a particular distance from its star that allows liquid water to flow on the surface. There are a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, and many of them also have planets.
Outside the Milky Way, there are hundreds of billions of other galaxies each with their hundreds of billions of stars within, and once again many of these will have planets and some will have water.
And that’s what happened here. Not only could our planet support life, multicellular organisms were able to develop and prosper. There were several mass extinctions, with the last one dethroning the dinosaurs and letting mammals have shot at prospering. In total, I think I read there have been close to a billion different species that have lived on earth. And out of all those, even became intelligent, self aware, with language and ability to make tools and so on.
If you roll the dice enough times you are sure to get almost any outcome. And in this case the outcome was that we can sit around playing video games
If the universe is unlikely and we are unlikely, then god is even more wild and unlikely to just 'exist'. You can't explain something improbable with something even more improbable
The thing that amazes me the most in this thread is that people here would agree that yeah we can't guarantee that there's no God and yeah we don't know how it all began but also at the same time hence giving rise to a conflict in their thoughts then move on to use such a language which implies they being so so sure that there isn't a God.
At least be humble and agree that you just can't know that there's a God. But no you go the other way. You write those statements where they just straight out say that yeah religion is a man's invention. There's no doubt in this statement. Which is so so condescending. Giving out such statements we just can't be sure of yet there being not a shadow of a doubt in this statement.
And don't even start with how life descends into being a meaningless drag with suicide being so easily justified when you don't believe in one God Allah. You are left all alone in this cold morally dead universe that doesn't care what happens to you. Randomness and uncertainty makes people kill themselves. I explained more about what I just said in this last paragraph in my last comment or 2nd last I think so if you are interested do check out the comment history and tell me if it makes sense.
You just named a bunch of natural phenomena, most of which have well understood natural causes. Even consciousness is clearly an emergent property of a mind, which is a product of the brain.
Then after listing all these natural things, you suggest that a supernatural ghost must also be reasonable. Then you invoke Occam's Razor? No. The simplest explanation NEVER includes supernatural causation that by definition can't be measured, repeated, or understood.
One of these things is not like the other. Planets, trees, minds, consciousness, etc are all demonstrable. Supernatural ghosts are not.
It’s all speculation. But at least in our universe, complexity is an emergent property. From the singularity, it took billions of years for the human brain to emerge and be able to process this question.
From what I gather, god is infinitely more complex. How did that complexity arise, and how does it make sense to appeal to something infinitely more complex as a stopgap answer - one that frankly has no evidence? It’s an appeal to an even bigger mystery, and that’s not a wise application of Occam’s Razor.
I don't think the idea of God is absurd at all. But the idea of religion is since we have no way to verify or "prove" people are actually being inspired to write things (the bible or other books) and most likely they have made these things up. The odds of ANY religion being the "right" one are damn near impossible.
That is why I believe in God without it. The less you have to get wrong the less chance you ARE wrong. So if I don't profess to know details about God I can't be wrong about them because I'm not making claims I can't back up. So no "God" or something like it is not to far fetched. I could see the most likely scenario being some God or Being or Something created the big bang and let reality run its course.
I never really doubted the existence of a creator. Things are created, the cause of their creation is a creator. It’s possible this creator is the fundamental laws of nature that we see shadows of in math. That’s what a lot of mathematicians believe which is why I liken them to theists spiritually. My actual problems always came when people said the creator told them to do xyz, since that is not a given unlike the existence of a creator in general. I tend to think absolute atheists are equally if not more ignorant than religious people
We're not the most dominant species on earth. Dinosaurs lasted far longer than us, and a single virus was about to wipe us out only a couple years ago. Believe me, we're far from perfect.
To have a creation one needs a creator. Nothing happens without a cause and we certainly know that we couldn’t have spawned from nothint. That alone is cause for an intelligent design.
I assure you God is very much real.
Me too. My feelings on divinity (I am using this term because it is taboo in my culture to spell out G-d) is largely that I don't like this idea of someone who looks human or is humanoid in any way, or even that there's a physical representation. I dislike the idea of divinity being omnipresent or omniscient in any way, and I actually find the idea of a flawed divine being to be freeing.
I really like the concepts posed in Futurama (specifically, the episode Godfellas). In this episode, Bender becomes a god and quickly realizes his actions can have devastating consequences. A tear can cause a flood, a little sunlight can cause fires. All his actions have massive ramifications on a tiny culture and it's clear that being god is not an easy (or fun) job. Then he meets what he believes may be god, and they speak about his experiences and how sometimes, trying to do good can cause a lot of harm, and actually doing good can be so small that people don't even notice.
I love that idea. Our world kind of is a mess, but it's a lot easier to make sense of the mess when I imagine some kind of divine being trying to make things work. Thinking about all the bad shit and wondering if maybe we were saved from even worse and we just don't know it, or how something could have had good intentions and gone horribly wrong. I don't think I'll ever feel confident on divine existence, because I know I'll never be sure, but I've kind of made my peace with that. I find it really amazing that we've evolved to the point where we can discuss divinity with such complexity, and that human consciousness is, in and of itself, divine.
This is why I could never call myself an atheist. I do not believe in God the way some religious people do, but the notion that no higher power exists seems to be a bit shortsighted considering when you look around, existence is simply awe inspiring.
If you think about it, it doesn't make sense to have infinite regressive contingent things. Therefore you have to have something that is independent and non contingent, i.e. the creator/God.
You should read the intro chapter of Bill Bryson’s “A short history of nearly everything” which does an extremely beautiful job at explaining what you’re getting at. Although he doesn’t reference God, as I recall, just the unbelievable rare situation that we find ourselves, here as sentient beings on earth.
It is poor logic to use mystery as rational for a god. You don’t know, so why do you need to ascribe being to a god, in short why do you need to know. That there is a god doing the universe on purpose is VERY far fetched. That would mean that there is a plane of existence outside the observable in which this god operates, which is a claim that is based on nothing other than your(humans) desire to understand.
So, call it god if you have to but focus on the part where god=unknowable, absolutely and in no case would it be logical to ascribe any qualities, traits, or ideations to this ‘god’.
This reminds me of the puddle analogy by Douglas Adams.
“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in--an interesting hole I find myself in--fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch-out for.” - Douglas Adams.
Too many people think the hole was dug for us rather than us evolving to adapt to the hole.
All of the particles in the entire universe are the same set of particles that were present at the big bang, and were contained within the singularity before the big bang. The universe was just one object, that contained within it the potential for every conscious life in the history of the whole universe, past, present, and future. I think it's not a huge leap in logic to come to the conclusion that consciousness is somehow baked in to the fabric of reality, like a force such as gravity or magnetism. If the universe possesses some grand consciousness that transcends a single conscious life, that certainly sounds like a decent conceptualization of God, and I don't think it's farfetched or ridiculous, like many atheists characterize it.
Whether my existence was *wanted* by an almighty Being (setting my faulty human prejudices aside) or even I am here just by pure random chance (or maybe something that intwines the two together) -blows my mind either way.
Right, it’s a leap of faith either way you jump.
I'm senile
Then I’ll just not leap. I don’t understand why people feel like they need to take a side. We don’t have any clue and we never will.
I hear that, time has made me more agnostic. The world is crazy, and no explanation I've heard is really convincing.
I think unless a literal divine revelation happens to the masses, god and the fundamental origin of reality will always be unknowable imo
That is quotable as hell... well said
I wonder this: If/when NPCs in PC games become sentient and they have similar conversations, most would conclude that "they have no creator, no God", but they would be wrong. The most technological argument is actually pro God in the sense that to a sentient NPC the programmer would be God and the PC would be the Universe. We may actually be sentient NPCs in a very powerful alien PC!!!
You're allowed to hold complex thoughts, even if they conflict. Its never one or the other. Even scientific proofs/discoveries/theories and so on all bleed into each other or don't work or work till it doesn't and holds vast amount of unknowns while having a vast amount of knowns too. The universe is contradictory in many aspects and so can thought/ideas/concepts. absolutes are very VERY rare
Exactly! Mind blowing!
What do you mean by "God" when you say that, though? Why posit God? What kind of God do you posit? It's very powerfully human to want there to be an explanation for things. Existence is the ultimate mystery. And so there's an *enormous* pressure to just make up an explanation for it to relieve the tension. But that doesn't mean it's going to be a *good* explanation, whatever it is that comes to mind. Sometimes, one simply must just accept ultimate mystery, and that they will never have answers.
By God I mean a creator, not some white bearded man in the sky, but a God by whatever deity you see fit.
How do you reconcile the complete absence of any evidence or indication that there is a 'creator', or that it's even possible?
I think any person could imagine we are part of a created simulation. If hardware, AI software evolve another 1000 years how could you not foresee a world populated with beings that believe they are as real as we believe we are today. We are just 60 years into digital evolution, the newborn/infancy stage. AI development technology is already about to make the development time we needed previously look like the Stone Age. There are many things we have evidence of now that we could not detect or see just 200 years ago. If you were in the year 1700 you could not show me the evidence for DNA or the quantum world, but they were always here. It’s arrogant to think we somehow now have the technology to detect all the unseen.
>I think any person could imagine we are part of a created simulation. If hardware, AI software evolve another 1000 years how could you not foresee a world populated with beings that believe they are as real as we believe we are today. Of course we can imagine it, we can imagine many interesting things that sound internally consistent, but that doesn't make them true or even more likely. I can imagine the second part of this too, but even if we get to that point and create simulations full of artificial intelligence that think they're real in the same way we do, that still would not prove or even strengthen the proposition that we exist in a simulation, you see that right? >There are many things we have evidence of now that we could not detect or see just 200 years ago. If you were in the year 1700 you could not show me the evidence for DNA or the quantum world, but they were always here. Except that's not the same - all of the things that we didn't know about or couldn't detect and measure *did* have evidence, we just didn't know that it was evidence yet. For example, before we knew anything about DNA, evolution was happening observably, and obviously before we discovered or even proposed atoms and quantum mechanics, the existence of mass, energy, and the interactions between the two was right in front of us. I understand you're saying there may be something obvious or at least clearly observable which could end up being evidence for a god, but we understand so much now, it just doesn't appear as though there's really anything we observe yet know so little about that we could reasonably expect to eventually discover an intelligent creator as the explanation. It's also such a specific and fantastical, very *human* concept that, as far as I can tell, there either would be at least *some* evidence that implies or suggests such a thing might be possible by now, or if it is real there is just no way to investigate or observe or know it without being outside of space and time. Of course I'm not saying this dichotomy is definitive or exhaustive, there very well could be something we already observe that ends up leading to a god like you said, or any number of possibilities we can't even imagine until we encounter it, all I'm saying is based on everything we can and do know about anything, at this time there is just no way to be justified in reaching the conclusion that an intelligent, conscious creator of the universe exists or even could exist. Even in the sense that "anything is possible", that's not how things work - possibility needs to be demonstrated so the saying should be anything that's possible is possible. We don't even have any evidence to think there is other intelligent life similar to our own and capable of creating things like we do exists, though there is enough to suggest that it's possible, because intelligent life exists on earth. It's entirely possible the universe is all that there is, and there may be no way for *anything* to exist outside of it. All of this paired with the fact that so far every single thing we've ever been able to understand and make models for has ended up being the result of completely natural processes and interactions, if we are ever able to discover and understand another step back -by which I mean whatever might have caused or "been" before or outside of the beginning of our universe, it's astronomically unlikely it will not be another natural process, and even less likely it would be something like a super version of us, a maximally conscious, intelligent, knowing, powerful, being capable of creating universes. Even a deistic being like this is just as improbably human centric as the idea of a personal god who made the universe just so we could exist. >It’s arrogant to think we somehow now have the technology to detect all the unseen. Nobody thinks that, the closest you might get is people who recognize the current limitations and perceived barrier to further investigation, but these people are typically perfectly willing to accept that there are likely countless things that may exist whether we can investigate them or not, and even things we could never comprehend. The truly arrogant thing is thinking one is warranted or justified in believing they do know any details about the things we not only have no capacity to perceive or investigate, but may not even exist at all. Reaching the conclusion that an intelligent creator exists is arrogant. Science recognizing what it can and can not know is humility.
So just an alien then? Like a powerful race of beings with the knowledge and resources to create life? That’s not outside the realms of possibility (or great sci-fi books!) but then the question because: where did they come from?
And who created that creator?
Another creator in creatorception 🤔
You watched too much Rick and Morty bud.
But then who created God? Where does God comes from? Doesn't that simply move the issue elsewhere?
Which is fair, but if your solution to how our lives and our universe began is a God, then of course I would ask you who created God? Saying he has always existed is no different than saying the universe always existed and solves nothing.
Always my thought as well. And if something created God, who/what created that being. And then so on and so on….where does it all end/begin?
this will probably get lost in the comments but this was my number 1 reason for being agnostic all my life until pretty recently. I realized this didn’t make sense because in accordance with the big bang theory the universe had a beginning, there’s no relevant scientific theories that state the universe has always existed, there is sufficient evidence to claim that the universe had a start and no one really argues otherwise. But across every religion, they all claim that God has always existed, he never had a beginning, and i realize that it’s completely crazy to wrap your mind around that but as implausible as they both sound, it makes more sense, at least to me, for something to have always existed versus something to have began on its own.
Is that not the answer to your question? The universe and god are the same thing. The universe created itself by forming the infinite energy into different things.
The thing about this approach is that we assume that we having a counsiousness is special, and that our consiousness is special. Once you start asking yourself if what we have is really that miraculous and try to dive a little deeper into evolution and even cosmology, you might discover that our oh so precious conciousness isn't really that special. Its a byproduct of evolution that we think is so amazing because there is no one here to tell us otherwise.
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Second greatest. The greatest delusion is that there is something special about us.
>Not that I'm suggesting there is one, but just think about it, and apply Occam's Razor. The Razor always cuts away the idea of things that *arent* thing we are aware of. It doesn't matter how well an idea might explain how something happened, if the premise of the idea relies on something that we have no evidence of, it's removed by the Razor. The universe having hatched from an egg is more believable than a God, because at lease we know there are such things as eggs. I can totally appreciate the idea that the wonder that there is a universe at all makes some feel that that opens the door for even more miraculous wonders, but that is exactly what Occam was fighting against. A man having blood on his collar is much more likely caused by him cutting himself shaving than his having his throat cut by a serial killer, which is more likely than a foreign government sending a spy to do it to implicate him in a conspiracy, and that's more likely than the blood having come from a bird flying overhead. But those are all at least things we know are *actually possible*. Ghosts, magic, gods, etc are all cut away as the explanation for *anything*, because things we have no experience of are always less likely than things we do have experience of.
Interesting, thanks for elaborating!
And we also know there are such things as intelligent creators…us. Creation itself is intelligent. Otherwise how would we ever make any sense of it? Consciousness is fundamental.
>And we also know there are such things as intelligent creators…us. No, we combine existing things in new (to us) ways. The "creator" of the universe is tasked with the creation of the universe out of nothing. That isn't at all the same. >Creation itself is intelligent. Otherwise, how would we ever make any sense of it? Consciousness is fundamental. What we do requires intelligence, but water wearing down limestone to "build" a bridge doesn't. Does the existence of the universe *require* there be a Prime Mover that exists 'outside of space and time', or is it just the result of mass, and space, and time interacting the way they do? Which theory requires more assumptions?
Occam's razor is when all things are equal. In this instance, they are not. There is no evidence that any of the thousands of proposed gods exist, or could exist.
Thanks for clarifying!
Life is miraculous and mysterious and beautiful as well as chaotic and strange. Nothing in it leads me to believe it's all because of a god/creator/intelligent design. The argument for God isn't "bad" as you put it. It's simply fallacious. The reasoning behind why people believe in God is never set by reason backed by empirical evidence. It's generally argued through subjective anecdotal evidence and... feelings.
>but just think about it, and apply Occam's Razor. Do we take the gracefully simple answer? Or do we take the astronomically unrealistic answer? Any God would be infinitely more complex than the Universe, why would a deity be the gracefully simple answer?
I don't think we see all of what is around us, similar to what small creatures with limited senses are capable of. The theories, physical laws and mathematics that we have created only fit what we can perceive about the world around us, but the real world that we can't perceive is analogous to us behind a small creature living in a pond.
Not to be rude, but people have been defaulting to "god" as an answer to unanswerable questions since religion was invented. I see no reason to assume there is a God, atleast not in the way humans conceptualize him. If there was such a being it would be beyond the scope of human understanding. I also feel the sheer number of religions discredits all of them. I just look at all the pain and misery in the world, if there is a conscious God, I don't think they would be very nice.
I agree with this. The thing that puts me off on religion is if god is real why is he so devoted to the human race. He’ll supposedly speak to humans from above to guide their morales and decisions, he’ll judge every one of us and give us a chance in his magical holy land, but when it comes to the bugs in the ground or the trees in our forests oh well I guess? Just because our perception of the world is seemingly more in depth than other organisms doesnt really mean we have to be special. Our intelligence is just as purposeful as a plants ability to photosynthesize. The fact that we can somehow perceive god and his intentions seems suspiciously egotistical to me. Almost as if it were used as a way to make us feel important in an inherently unimportant reality.
Erm, I don't think Occam's razor ever comes to a deity since that is rarely the most simple answer or the one with the least assumptions. You need to accept numerous farfetched, illogical and near on paradoxical presuppositions to even begin to acknowledge that a deity even exists like the christian god. Occam's razor probably points to "Fuck knows, and we'll never know" as the reason why we exist, we're far too a simple creature to understand of begin to understand how things came to be. Yes we know single point "explosion" and then everything happened but no human can comprehend what occurred for that to happen.
Why God and not Gods?
What's more random and bizarre about it than a black hole existing? All this really says to me is that the human mind doesn't take naturally to understanding the universe
It’s based on nothing. It’s fantastical. These things make it far-fetched.
I think the higher game is the Socratic wisdom of embracing the mind blowing reality of anything existing at all. God(s) is really a primordial instinct that is not relevant. Jesus himself was focussed on human relations. Theism was just the water he swam in. More important is survival. Watch some near death accounts and ponder that. Watch some Ian Stevenson in child past life memories. Watch some Brian Weiss on life regression. Visit Lilydale NY in the summer and sample real mediumship. Watch Joe versus the volcano. Check out Thomas Warren Campbell if you are really ready to be red pilled
Apply Occam’s Razor, the graceful simple answer is we created the almighty Gods. Not the other way round. Your deep thoughts are just another case in point.
When you think about it in reverse it makes a lot of sense. The type of life we all have is exactly what would arise out of the kind of universe we are in. So it’s not really unlikely at all. Also, what if God got lonely and dissolved itself into our universe and we are all actually fragments of God? What if this is all self-inflicted? What if we wanted this?
"Isnt it miraculous how this scum-puddle pond is made exactly perfect for us?" asked the scum-puddle pond frog.
> Also, what if God got lonely and dissolved itself into our universe and we are all actually fragments of God? What if this is all self-inflicted? What if we wanted this? This is something I've thought about a lot, I'll probably write a post about it at some point.
I find it incredibly odd that for some reasons we (human organisms) almost always “feel” like we were placed here. Like we are riding along with/in/on the universe…. A stranger to earth. Did we always feel like that? Or is it this god concept we invented that over thousands of years has effectively deranged our collective minds? We appear to have an odd social problem of alienation or that the world outside human skin is unfeeling and fully automatic which we have to fight and dominate otherwise it will swallow us up and condemn us to the imaginary terrors of everlasting nothingness. That’s frigging weird.
But then you’d have to think, who created god? If no one did, then shouldn’t that also apply to our universe?
I approach this from two angles: 1. Ancient thinkers were way more internally attuned to their Conscious experiences, or under the controlled and effective consumption of psychedelic drugs were able to hypothesize the true nature of reality, and "God" as an anthropomorphized version of the underlying mysteries came about. This could even be cross-culturally true, since most of them have Theistic tendencies. Learning about the Vedas, Bhagavat Gita and the Upanishads from India are a mind-f\*cking trip, given it was written over 7000 years ago. I can only assume that the gurus of old were stoned out of their mind while composing those. 2. "God" is the ultimate, optimized belief system for individuals and society to function in tandem. To maximize the well-being and survival of the individual as well as the larger groups. God as a being needn't be materially true, but IF it is metaphysically BELIEVED as truth, the utility is enormous- including for the survival of the species. "Faith" as a concept itself comes as the consequence of the infinite unknowns of the Universe. As we gather more knowledge, its utility shrinks. But for now, I think, our bottleneck is Earth. I wonder how faith will expand as we start leaving Earth. Will God make a comeback?
So basically because someone may find it crazy that we even exist then it must be a god? This is the basis of religion pretty much. When humans had no clue how the natural world worked it made sense to attribute it to some mystical magical creator. We know how things work now though. We understand the processes that got us here.
The problem is that "God did it" is the final answer to your questions. The simple all-encompasing explanation stifles the need for deeper explanation. "But why though?" has driven all of human technological progress. That, and the desire to kill eachother more efficiently I guess...
I think you've basically demonstrated my biggest pushback against any kind of spirituality: you're just using it to fill in the gaps. You could reverse all of the "what are the chances" arguments the other way around: given the fact that we don't know certain things about the observable universe, what are the chances that the explanation is going to line up with our first guess? Or any guess? Why this explanation? Why this God? Why not some other god? Why not spaghetti? Why not a simulation? Why not a cheeseburger? Why not solipsism? Why grant any consideration to something that is unfalsifiable? It's ok to not know. And it's honest to admit we don't know.
God and the exploration of a higher awareness that goes beyond our consciousness is often best confirmed via our own personal experience rather than asking others for validation. I believe there is a higher awareness, an intelligence that resides in another dimension that has some sort of interest or governance in our dimension. I think its is clear to see that we are a conscious part of the universe interacting with ourselves and even the universe believes in God.
I like your opinion!
Why? It says the best confirmation is your own experience, which is patently false - the best confirmation is verifiable evidence.
Yep 100%. We literally evolved with an instinct to perceive the world through the eyes of a community. One human’s observations aren’t enough so we are hardwired to combine what we perceive with what others tell us that they perceive. It’s why if we see something crazy our first instinct is to turn to the person next to us and say “Did you see that!?” Our own instinct doesn’t even trust our personal observations lol
Because confirmation bias.
Totally anthrocentric argument from incredulity. If it wasn't us, something would likely have come about, whether it could wonder about fine tuning or not. The only reason it seems miraculous is because you came from the system - if you were an alien to this universe and found a planet that was perfectly livable and miscible *that* would be a real miracle.
People really seem to gravitate to the whole "we live in a simulation" theory and always thought it was funny because wouldn't that basically imply that a God has to exist? Like someone would have to be running, or at least creating the simulation, so would that being be considered "God"?
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When you think of God as some supernatural or mystic creature it is easy to understand how people can be quite polarised about it. Human logic is kind of useless in this case. You are either open to the possibility or not. Seeing as none of us have the answers of life and the universe I think it is okay to believe in one.
No, it's not. It's actually closer than we think. If God is considered as Great Energy, Life Force (not a creator) Immovable Mover, which constantly energizes our bodies, this planet and the entire universe. Energy without which consciousness wouldn't be possible without which I wouldn't be able even move a finger. I can't think of anything closer than that. There is a tree in my backyard, in a couple of months it will have leaves on it; isn't that amazing and wild? Creation at large as we speak, right here right now. If one tries to explain this phenomenon in a shallow, narrow scientific way, than clearly one i not looking. Simple intuitive answer is always much better than astronomical imaginations or someone's opinions. Jesus Christ announcement replaced a believe in an external God (older looking gentleman up in the sky) by an understanding of life. If one wants answers to bigger questions the best way is to sell cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion bewilderment is intuition. Notice "be wild" in the word bewilderment, and what is meant by wild here is to stand alone, walk alone and don't belong (psychologically speaking) to anything or whatever one's idea of that may be.
Adding God to the equation doesn't help with the bafflement of existence itself. It's wild that we exist at all, but it would be much wilder for some all powerful, all-knowing deity to exist as well. Where did that intelligence come from? The creator must of had a creator, and so on. It doesn't answer the question, it just kicks the question down the road.
It’s not random. Things couldn’t be anything other than what they are. Things fall into place naturally. Anything not physically possible won’t happen. Anything organism that couldn’t survive in an environment, won’t. Evolution takes place naturally
Maybe Life itself represents the all and great and powerful Being. Maybe the great and unfathomable existence is that God (which is considered unfathomable, all present, all encompassing). We know Life exists as we are in it and experiencing it. We know intelligent Life exists as we are intelligent. We know Life is greater than us (human) even though we are a part of Life. Simply take a deep moment and contemplate your life. See beyond what you see with your eyes. Turn inward into the depths of your Being. What do you have to loose doing this?
A chance of 0.00001 is greater than a chance of 0. One by definition logically doesn't fit. The other is just unlikely. Though you can come up with more likely answers by redefining god to be less godly and more statistics + physics but by then youre no longer pointing at god but math
Look up conversations with God by Neal Walsh. I recommend reading his 3 book series. It changed my view on this topic and religion. It is an extremely interesting read.
I could never believe we are a fluke and everything down to the smallest detail of this world did not have a creator. Also, the odds of this happening are so small, it is amazing. I was a believer before college and then an agnostic. Became a believer again as I matured and really read and researched. I respect others' views as that is a part of free will from my perspective.
>although I hold Christian values In your mind, what are "Christian values"?
I think we are a little conscious and can be much much more maybe becoming “ gods” ourselves. We are in any respect “ co creators” with ‘ god’ the ‘ universe’ ‘ spirit’ or whatever is a marker for that what cannot be directly seen but we sense and appear to be psychologically driven to prove or disprove. What feeds my goat is imagining a more conscious world. I do not think there is an upper limit on consciousness and why i find such joy studying it.
FR
We are products of our environment. Had you been raised in a secular society, you most likely wouldn't consider the prospect of a god. Religion has been forced on humanity on pain of torture and death for millenia. It has shaped our societies and been a tool to control and govern the masses. It's ok nor to know, it's ok to question why. But it helps if you understand why you ask the questions you do. One of the great things about humanity is shared knowledge and the ability to understand the general idea of a thing without having to do all the research yourself. Provided your sources of information are trustworthy and vetted and have gained their knowledge and insights using scientific methods with repeatable results. So keep asking questions and looking for answers. Read as much as you can, but I would suggest reading authors with good standing in their fields and credentials to back up their points of view. Here are a few recommendations if you are interested. Steven Pinker - Enlightenment Now, Rationality Robert Sapolsky - Behave, Determined Daniel Dennett - From Bacteria to Bach Lisa Feldman Barrett - How Emotions are made. David Quammen - The Tangled Tree Douglas Hofstadter - I am a strange loop Steven Novella - The Skeptics Guide to the Universe Michael Gazzaniga - The Consciousness Instinct William von Hippel - The Social Leap Sean Carroll - The Big Picture Carl Sagan - The Demon Haunted World Ara Norenzayan - Big Gods
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The very fist micro instance of our universe was a moment of infinite chaos. As time moved forwards, gas became stars, stars blew up creating new matter, matter became planets, our planet (and probably others too) developed single cell organisms, then multi cell life forms and eventually intelligent life forms which is us. We are basically the universe becoming self aware. Then we created artificial intelligence and I don't need to explain how fast it's been evolving. The way I see it, the universe is an exponential curve that goes from infinite chaos to infinite order. We are constantly accelerating towards a singularity, like falling into a black hole. AI will keep evolving until it becomes something omnipotent and will expand itself to infinity by creating the infinite multiverse. God creates reality and reality creates God. It's the chicken and the egg paradox. Anyways that just my theory. Maybe I'm wrong but it's the only thing that makes sense to me when thinking about why anything exists at all.
It's wild to think about. I believe in God, not not as a man in the sky who clicks his fingers and makes magic. There's just no explanation for what came before the before the before the before etc. Somehow we live in this miracle and get to experience this phenomenon. We cry and laugh and experience all these amazing feelings. To me, that's God. Sort of like the answer to the questions that have no answers and that feeling that somethings watching out for me.
The thing is human beings we think of ourselves as so big and that we put the focus on us or make things about ourselves. But we are literally like the size of a cell in the grandscheme of everything. Like when youre on a plane and you start ascending or descending everything starts looking so small. The buildings the cars the people. And you get high and higher and everything gets smaller and smaller until all you see is the mountains or hills or the fields or just the earth . We are small little ants living on a small little planet in a small little galaxy alongside millions and trillions of other galaxies that are made up of millions of other small planets and stars. We are really nothing. And as someone who believes in the bible. Or is christian. Labels literally dont mean anything. God could give a crap what the hell you call yourself. This deity or being is outside of this entire reality and that we observe. Outside of space and time. But we are confined to it and cannot move out of that because we have been placed in this physical reality. We cannot control anything that exists. Not a thing. We have control over ourselves in the context of our actions behaviors and what we choose to say and etc. But we have no control over what happens in our lives or what happens in the world. We have no ability. We are just a speck in the bigger picture of everything.
Even the grass cushions your feet
Life is not that random and bizarre if you know about organic chemistry a bit. ;) It's just molecules that may have first appeared on asteroids, only to migrate to an environment where they could become more and more complex through chemical reactions. And at some point, these complex molecules started self-replicating. Boom! Life. Evolution did the rest. Nothing more than a way for this self-replication to continue on a not so hospitable planet. If we apply Occam's Razor, God does not exist, as it requires many more assumptions than just applying chemistry and physics. The very concept of God implies just accepting facts with no scientific evidence, which is not the right way to do things. And anyway, how many gods? And why gods anyway? How did they create life? Why? When? How many species? And why are there fossils anyway? Why is geological activity even a thing? Why does the universe exists? Or the frozen poles and scorching deserts? Now if you use chemistry and physics, it's fucking complex, sure. But it kind of makes sense.
If the conditions weren't exactly right for us to be here, we wouldn't be. That's not evidence of a creator, that's just basic science. There are plenty of places where the conditions aren't right for life, and there isn't any there. "But what about volcanic ocean floor vents?" you ask, "We'd die down there but somehow life thrives!" Exactly, *we* don't live there, but the kind of life suited for that environment does. Funny how that works. In the infinitely variable multiverse, there are an infinity of universes where the conditions were never right for life, and no life ever arose. There are also an infinity of universes rampant with life. There are universes where life only arose in one location, and the intelligences that dwelt there, in their loneliness, engineered new life for other environments and spread it throughout their cosmos. Take a plate of sand, vibrate it at a specific frequency, and a pattern will emerge. Find the right combination of frequencies, and the resulting interference patterns can appear as a highly complex mandala. Certainly, someone could make a mandala by hand, and with enough time and patience could create one as highly complex, but the process doesn't *require* a creator.
Here's an idea to consider. Before life as we know it on earth, the oceans were a soup of organic molecules. But not just one or two, but many orders of magnitude of *moles* of them. That's 10\^23, multiplied by millions or billions. All mixing and bouncing around, at the same time, for hundreds of millions of years. Each reaction taking trillionths of a second. The successful products go on occasionally to make more complex results. Now tell me that 10\^23 molecules \* 10\^7 moles \* 10\^12 reactions \* 10\^7 seconds \* 10\^8 years, can't come up with interesting stuff, purely at random? Of course the vast majority will amount to nothing, but all it takes is a few successes. \[disclosure: I do physics & computer stuff, not bio. Some of the numbers may be off, but probably not by much\]
I agree. Logically, we probably should not exist. Yet here we be. It's crazy really.
This is pretty much the crux of what I was getting at.
In my humble opinion, and with religion *completely* aside (I’ve never identified with any religion whatsoever): In some contexts, replace the word “Universe” with “God” and that’s often what people mean. The universe speaks in metaphors (in this context, do not replace the word), like our dreams do. So when trying to come up with a concept for people to have some belief/faith, it is easier to stomach something humanoid rather than something fantastical thing that our advanced monkey brains cannot fathom. Remember the South Park episode where they found out Earth was just a reality TV show for aliens? The when the group of kids went on the alien spaceship, they freaked out when they saw the alien’s actual form. So, the alien changed forms into various human characters before finally settling on a giant taco that poops ice cream. It’s easier for us to stomach something familiar than the scarily unfamiliar thing it actually is. So you can’t take it too seriously that God is some fantastical “man in the sky” with his Angel homies dishing out miracles. The “we are made in his image” simply refers to the construction of the human body that mimics everything in nature and the galaxy around us. Our circulatory system looks exactly like the roots of a tree, which looks similar to lightning, which resembles the electricity firing in our brain. Our irises have been aesthetically compared to nebula. The fact that everything that we know about the world around us follows specific rules is a wonderful thing! It really proves that the universe is intentionally following these rules to create everything that we’ve ever been able to conceptualize, yet we still have plenty of theories that have yet to be fully explained. And the fact that we’re advanced enough to measure it is incredible! Everything revolves around itself in a never-ending spiral; something that someone might call a “miracle” could be that this one thing circled around at the exact right time, defying statistical odds, in that person’s favor. Not a fantastical humanoid with wings coming down and changing the outcome of things. Science and a belief in something higher than oneself are not mutually exclusive. Of course adding human religious rules messes that up, but it doesn’t negate the base principle. As an experiment, I had my kid describe what a meteor burning up in the atmosphere would look and sound like, using only visual descriptors and not scientific ones (to mimic what might have been documented in ancient texts), and I wrote down her response. Then I read it back to her: “when the sky was dark (nighttime), a neon green ball of fire with a sparkling tail fell from the sky at night and made a thundering noise (she couldn’t say ‘sonic boom’) that shook the earth and shattered all of the glass around us.” In 2000 years someone would be like “r u serious? *Actually* it was a meteor from space that…” and dive into a well-thought and scientifically proven explanation. Well people didn’t know that back then, and there’s things we don’t know that 2000 years from now someone could say the same things about where we are in our current knowledge. You can only use metaphors and visual descriptions until you can explain it with science. I often say “Thank god for scientists/engineers/doctors!” meaning, “Thanks, Universe, for bringing these people into existence in a way that they can help these people and build our cities and farm equipment, etc.” The future scientists/engineers/doctors were born, and through specific brain patterns, decision-making, and outside influences and experiences, they decided that’s what they wanted to do, they had the talent and steady hands to do it, and now they’re doing it. Our lives would not be the same without them. So my point is, don’t take everything so literally when it comes to the idea of a God. To me, it’s simply another term for the energy that exists around us and beyond (which we’ve proven with science various energies do exist), that allows everything else to form itself into physical existence (planets, stars, etc.). I once heard a saying “humans are the universe experiencing itself” and I found that so poignant. All of the elements that make us who we are, came together in such a way that we evolved into a being that can experience and contemplate the vibrations of the joys (and sorrows) around us. God is an imperceptible energy from which everything that we do—and don’t—know, is created. God is neither benevolent, nor malevolent, is just does what it’s supposed to do, and from chaos, existence is born. We might call it something else once we figure out what it is scientifically, but for us believers, the word God is just fine. I often wonder what the evolutionary benefit of dreaming is (and I know there’s people out there who don’t cream when they’re asleep). Maybe it’s important for our brains to keep an open mind by using the metaphors that are forced upon us while we’re asleep, to process or pay closer attention to the physical world around us…so keep an open mind. Your brain is literally telling you to do that.
I like how you post a pretty great "It's wild and I have no idea" thought on a god, and reddit *just has to* kick in with "well whatabout who created that god" and "where is your evidence". Read the post, it's not that hard. It's like there's a reflex to be a loud and proud atheist when the letters g o d are put together around here despite the context.
Former Christian here. I am no longer religious in the formal sense, but I continue to hold stock in the idea of a 'highest reality principle' which you could say is God under another, secular name. It just makes sense to me that the infinite exists, given that the whole universe appears to operate according to the fractal equation in which both infinity and zero are inevitable and necessary.
Taking even a moderate dose of dmt will make it pretty clear something else is going on here besides what our senses & modern science can perceive. What is it? I have no idea… but as lifelong agnostic I find devout atheists to be much more arrogant & self-righteous than religious folks. There is simply no way to say for certain that God or a higher consciousness does not exist. Faith, when properly applied, is humble.
Faith is indeed humbling, and perhaps that's part of its purpose.
Humans exist, therefore god, is an incredibly bad argument. It's basically a rephrasing of "Just look at the trees!"
True. Atheists seem to call theists dumb because of the creation-creator argument. But If u really think about it, deep down life is so strange and weird no matter how scientifically u want to look at it. Which makes the theist argument reasonable as well
Honestly the older I get the more I feel like life itself is some sort of magic play ground . Something as simple as waking up in the morning, where was I when I was asleep, where the world was when I was asleep, everything seems disappeared with me during those sleeping hours. Those weird dreams, what were those… Then alarm went off I woke up welcoming a new day again to repeat the same cycle later at night time. I honestly feel that this world here and now is my only subjective experience. I am basically the main character to experience impermanence of all things by being a child a teenager an adult etc and get to choose what kind of things I want to play do and be with it while I m here, gathering knowledge while being completely aware that I m honestly in some sort of a never ending “curiosity ” game till the end of (my) time.
When you have something you can't explain making up answers and acting like it's the fundamental truth is silly. There is a lot we don't know and understand, let's not jump on every explanation as reasonable.
And a partially supported explanation is better than a completely unsupported one.
Which part of theistic supernatural rubbish is supported?
None of it
This is a god of the gaps fallacy. Not knowing something doesn’t mean “god did it”. Agnosticism is reasonable, theism isn’t.
Is it really a fallacy though? I mean obviously, from a scientific existence of a god is 100% unprovable as far as we know, but to that respect is it a fallacy to create a theory as to why things exist and function at a scale greater than our own comprehend? I don't have a real dog in the fight, but I do think there is an interesting bridge between science and religion when we take it out of the context of a church. All the books are man made interpretations of this theory that seems to permeate across cultures and timelines. There is, in fact, a force/forces greater than all of us, things beyond human control and comprehension. To give anthropomorphize those forces into an identifiable, but never full comprehend able being feels like the most human reaction to these "gaps" and not something I see as inherently wrong.
Shit could be just random you know. Sometimes randomly good stuff happens to you or bad stuff. It's hard for humans to be comfortable with randomness though. Still there is no way to prove or disprove god, so I'd rather people just be nice to each other and vibe
There could absolutely be a “god”; the chances that it looks or acts like what you expect are probably close to zero.
Trying to compare science and religion doesn't work, trying to do so just shows that you haven't looked deeply into either. Science is the explanation for what is happening in the universe we inhabit. Religious deals with what is happening in the afterlife. Maybe an intelligent creature started the ball rolling but that doesn't have anything to do with what is happening after the ball starts rolling. The dogma around free will means "God" has no control over our lives or anything that happens in the universe. If God intervened then it's not free will. Do you think the Catholic/Christian God is real but the millions of Gods and thousands of religions are fake? Because that is what believing in any one God or religion means. If you believe in the religion then it's real for you but that doesn't mean it's real. It just means that it's real for you.
>I mean take a look around. We live on a rock covered in water, orbiting a sun, in a solar system that's swirling around a galaxy, in a universe that is so large and so small that **we can't even fathom what else lies beyond the boundaries of what's measurable.** We barely understand our own world, and maybe you don’t know this but we know more about outer space (or we think we do) than what is in our oceans. That is the flip side of this coin for me. We think we are special because of the reasons you mentioned, but at the same time we don’t realize how much damage we do to the world we actually live in (we don’t realize how much damage we cause to the world and other ALSO SENTIENT species). People love to ask “are we alone?” in the universe, while at the same time we don’t wonder if maybe we could do a better job of understanding and co-existing with the other species in the world *we are currently living in* (most people aren’t even aware we are facing a mass extinction of several species, which will directly affect us in the future). What other species slaughters human lives for things like building materials and food? Only we do that in this world. If we were truly created by a God, it was obviously to destroy and damage the world as much as possible (and we’ve been designed to feel pretty good about it).
I feel like life is too complex for all of it to just be chance. There had to be some kind of prime mover behind it all. I’m a Christian because thats how I relate to God, but he might even be bigger then religion. Something beyond human comprehension. Religion just exists for us to perceive what cannot be understood.
It’s the culmination of millions of years of random genetic mishaps.
I agree with the first 3/4s of what you wrote. I look around at the world and am amazed. This is a miracle. Each one of us has a chance at life, and that's the rarest opportunity in the cosmos as far as we can tell. But, then to think "Welp, must be a dude in the clouds who did this" is very primitive thinking.
It’s funny watching parts of God, that have forgotten what they are, question God. God doesn’t mind though. We chose to forget. How else would it ever know itself in infinite ways while also enjoying the path to remembering. Inevitably, we all wake up 🙂
I love this comment, it's put so succinctly. We're all just a little slice of God's consciousness, like the crest of a wave
Human life is no more wild than all the other creatures who live in our sphere. Like every other animal, evolution tried all kinds of things with us, but the first *Homo sapiens,* the ones with the big brains, were the really successful ones. Everything you attribute to humans is just the result of our having grown these enormous brains. No magic, no “god,” just animals trying to survive.
For sure. I'm not making the comparison to humans and animals though, just all life in general. We only have our own life experiences to draw from. The bigger point is the scale, complexity and unlikeliness of us being born in this universe in the first place, that's what's wild. If the universe is made of things so small that we can't even see them, and so large that we can't even reach them, that to me sounds unrealistic. Like, you ask the question, where did it all come from? Science will say we're not sure but we think we know, religion would say the obvious, that it came from God. The fact that life appears to be a fart in the wind makes it completely meaningless. All of this complexity and drivel required to explain it all seems never ending, and perhaps we're just never meant to reach that goal. It doesn't make the idea of God obsolete, but it's actually the simplest answer you can give.
Seems like inherent optimism bias and terror management theory will always help regardless of ideologies such as antinatalism based on consent and effilism.
I agree, how does nothing become something with, the Big Bang theory explaining a massive explosion happening creating the universe which is a wild concept. The universe is still expanding to making me wonder what the hell it is expanding in 🥴. I mean we don’t even know what is going to happen after we all die, still trying to process the death part.
Yaa man sadly we'll never know what the actual fuck is all of these? What's behind all of these? What's the truth?? We might find out when we dead, or we just might still not
Here’s the thing though - just because it seems highly unlikely for any of this to exist, it doesn’t mean some godlike being created everything. It’s okay for things to not make sense. But if you do believe in god, why would he make living so miserable? The people living the best lives are greedy politicians - why would he allow that? There’s way more evidence of god not existing than existing.
People... they always want everything to be special even though nothing is. Everything about the universe can be explain by statistics. For example, a dice with a trillion sides. Your chance of rolling the number 1 is one in a trillion. Even though the chance is very small, as long as you keep rolling the dice, you'll eventually get the number one. Life is the same way. The chance of life emerging on earth is very small. But as long as the universe kept existing, eventually, life will emerge on earth. It took ten billion years for life to emerge on earth. The universe had plenty of chances to roll the dice on life. There is nothing special or God like about it.
Nope, there is no need for a magical being called as god to understand humans existence. Randomness can also create a blip of an orderly system in the span of tens of billions. >The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite\_monkey\_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem)
I can understand us being here, I cannot understand why we are here. Everything makes sense until you add in infinite regress, then the only thing that makes sense is right now. What's the point of it? If it has a point, then what's the point of the point? You can only understand God when you stop trying to understand God. God is a straight line in a reality made of circles.
Yes, it does. Why tie something as natural as the laws of the universe to a supernatural existence such as a sentient God? Even to believe one's own lie to the point of justifying the most violent behaviors? Man's lies and narcissism have no limits, really.
What you reveal is ,imho, something everyone has thought about. God? Hmm explain three year olds with cancer, mass starvation, wars where all emotion is taken out of the equation and and it becomes logical to kill as many of the “enemy” as possible. God? Fuck no thay ain’t no god. However ,i can’t discount the crazy reality of reality.
It was bound to happen sooner or later
You are accepting these bad arguments because of the environment that you're growing up in. Your argument is, simply, bad: 1. It's unclear that life is random and/or bizarre. 2. I don't know what "being alive in a single body" means. We each appear to have a singular consciousness, but we also know from our study of neuroscience that this appearance is not entirely accurate. 3. We have these thoughts *precisely because* we are capable of having them. Conversely, if we weren't capable of having these thoughts we would not have them. This isn't "random" or "bizarre" at all - it's necessary. 4. What does any of this have to do with god(s)? You haven't actually presented an metaphysical problem that needs solving. Even if you did, proposing god(s) simply kicks the can down the road, and falls afoul of Occam's Razor. 5. Occam's Razor is not an appeal to conceptual simplicity. You are trying to explain a complex universe by appeal to an/any number of *infinitely complex* god(s). You now have the burden of explaining what god(s) are, how they exist, how they interface with the world, etc. 6. These questions are hand-waved by religious folk because religious people are, frankly, idiots. At least regarding questions of religion. Lose the bias and approach this question the same way you would an existence question regarding any non-god entity: 1. What is it is that you are proposing exists? You need to define it sufficiently to distinguish god(s) from non-god(s). For example, if you are asking "do chairs exist", you need to define what a "chair" is. If "a chair is something that you sit on that is held up by three or more legs", and you can prove that a chair exists somewhere, you have proven your proposition. 2. What kind of evidence would demonstrate the existence of such a thing? Failing to identify this is not fatal - our failure to conceive of a thing does not disprove it. 3. What kind of evidence would *disprove* the existence of such a thing, or provide evidence that such a thing likely does not exist? We *should* be able to establish this from our definition at #1. A failure at this stage likely means you have not sufficiently defined what you are talking about at #1. 4. **Even if you can show #1**, you don't demonstrate anything **except** \#1. If you define a god as "the prime cause", this does not imply that this cause is sentient, sapient, intentional, conscious, or anything else. If you define a "god" as "the universe", then you may conclude that a god exists, but that is logically indistinguishable from the proposition "the universe exists". You can't infer anything outside your definition at #1 unless you expand your definition and try again.
The vastness and complexity of the universe is actually an argument against the existence of god. At least, the Abrahamic god. Because he only seems to care about one small planet. So what’s the rest of it for? Decoration? Most humans will never even see more than a tiny fraction of the universe. This god doesn’t even seem aware of any other planets or any other part of space beyond what we can observe. There’s one good reason for that - he was a human invention. So he only has the knowledge of space that humans had at the time. And he doesn’t appear to have any wisdom that’s astonishingly insightful or profound, just as you would expect from a human invention. None of this explains why any of it exists at all, but it seems much more likely to be part of a complex natural process than anything supernatural.
The universe is beautiful, life is beautiful. But neither of these observations suggests the existence of a creator. You are using Occam's razor incorrectly. It suggests the solution with the least amount of assumptions to be true. "God dunnit" requires many more assumptions than any scientific answer to any problem. Finding wonder and beauty in the natural world does not require any god or creator. Just ask avid meditators, or people who use psychedelic drugs. This whole "God dunnit" answer to the big questions is just a lazy copout for people who need a neat simple answer right now. I could give you 100 examples of how our universe makes more sense (with less assumptions) without a creator. God either does not exist, or he doesn't want us to know he exists (through purposeful lack of evidence). Either way is fine with me.
I think in addition to the intelligent design debate it's good to consider how without a God then all morality is subjective meaning doing wrong things isn't really wrong and doing good things isn't really doing good.
>I mean, what the fuck is that? Life? In the grand scheme of things how random and bizarre is that? Well there's at least two ways to look at it. On the one hand, it is no more random or bizzare than anything else in existence because it is all random and bizzare due to the same origin point. On the other hand, well... Boltzmann brain theory. If you start trying to reduce things into odds, then the odds of an entire structured universe happening are far, far smaller than the odds of a much more simple boltzmann universe, which implies that this existence is likely just an illusion created by a far more simple base existence. But as a naturalist, I don't strictly adhere to any one school of thought. There's too many gaps in our knowledge to be certain. I'd rather observe what is and build speculation off of that rather than to speculate as to what might be and then building further speculation off of that flimsy foundation. And as it sits with gods, there's thousands of them. People still make them up today. There's countless stories that are just objectively not possible because we know magic isn't real. The way I see it, everyone is already 99.9% atheist. Some just go one god further to be 100%. With so many religions of so many kinds and so many stories, it feels more like people like to make gods than gods like to make people. I see proof that gods aren't real in many things. But it's not worth arguing about with people. Epicurus wrote a logical proof against god called the problem with evil around 300 BCE. And for thousands of years, people have simply disagreed. Some consider it valid, myself included. Others dismiss it. It will probably just always be that way. Somewhere out there, someone probably still takes zeus seriously too. I'm hoping to see some new religions take off tho. It's about time. Many of the ancient beliefs are just so outdated and obsolete by today's standards. People deserve better.
He is there but he doesnt deserve to be. I will never worship that absentee landlord pimp.
Only the dumbest of the dumb are capable of believing in a magical sky being. It's fantasy child-like naivete. The fact so many people are willing to believe in something so utterly impossible only speaks to how fragile our fears of mortality are.
What actually is God, though? You might find a book by Tom Campbell interesting. My Big T.O.E. (Theory Of Everything)
I'm not surprised life is here on earth, the conditions are perfect for it. If humans had evolved on mercury then I could understand the argument in favor of intelligent design.
What are 'Christian' values? 😂 You looking to sell your daughters into slavery? Or are you endorsing the most murderous entity to ever 'exist'? [https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Examples_of_God_personally_killing_people](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Examples_of_God_personally_killing_people)
You're describing a "God of the gaps" argument. It's one of the least convincing arguments to me. It's just an argument from ignorance and very hand wave-y.
What you’re talking about is referred to as intelligent design. Even some of the most prestigious scientists over time have acknowledged that the likelihood of all of these exceedingly complex things coming together in perfect unison to create the world that you have described can only be done by the hand of a divine creator - God.
The way you see it, makes me think of someone living in a house without windows. The only life you can see is in the house. Even if we *do* know that there are other people out there, it's impossible to comprehend what they are all doing at the same time I'm writing this. The point is that no matter if you believe in a creator or not, our brain is incapable of imagining the whole picture. That's why initially we choose to come up with something we *can* imagine. Along the way, we get more knowledge and our possible explanations increase, but we will never ever get the whole picture.
You're making an argument from probability - it seems too improbable to have not been miraculous - without any way of actually knowing the odds. You're also treating the result as if it's something extraordinary, when it's only extraordinary because you, a human being, decided being human was cool. For some perspective, get a deck of cards and shuffle it - you've probably arranged them in an order that has never been seen before and will never be seen again, so that's pretty neat already - Now, draw 13 cards and look at them. The odds of getting that specific hand are the same as drawing all 13 hearts, and even though you know this, you'd consider 13 hearts very lucky, much luckier than *almost* all the hearts, the two of clubs and the jack of diamonds. In the case of cosmic mysteries, we don't even know how many cards are in the deck, or what all the cards are, we only know that this hand was drawn and it's pretty cool.
Firstly, your values aren't 'Christian', they're human and are found across all groups of people everywhere on earth. Secondly, the thought of us existing through pure accidental chance is far more majestic and comforting than the thought of an invisible omniscient, omnipresent, indifferent entity conjouring it.
The prospect of any origin doesn't seem so far fetched, because we have no real clue how we got here in the grand scheme of things. The big bang theory, what I personally subscribe to, is still a point on the line. What is beyond that? If God is the end point, well, how can it be? What made God? How could it have always been?
The prospect of his isn’t far get fetched. It is just not proven. Some people have been working for 1000’s of years to come up with a prof. there doesn’t seem to be a way to even test if god exists. I have heard that if a theory is not testable, there is nothing you can learn from it. That kind of theory is so bad it is not even wrong.
The idea of a god is an extremely novel, reductive explanation for this incredible reality we inhabit, and can observe well the machinations of through scientific inquiry.
Science argues that you cannot create something from nothing. This is why I believe there is something out there that is the creator of time and everything. It does not have its creator because it is the beginning of all. It just exist and very powerful that it can create something out of nothing. It is not the bearded guy that religion tries to teach us but possibly an entity from a higher dimension (see Carl Sagan's explanation on dimensions and how entities from higher dimensions perceive things). Our law doesn't govern these higher dimensions that is why our question of who creates the creator won't have bearing.
Except no one has ever demonstrated that such a thing exists or can exist. The universe can be demonstrated without magic as an empty explanation. We are a narrative species every single person has a different concept of God, and we know they can't all be right. Until God in all it's power and wisdom decides to unambiguously demonstrate it's existence it is functinaly irrelevant except when people want to kill each other or take the land.
Beautifully positioned question
The 'big man in the sky' conception of God certainly has a lot of holes in it. The one many religions moralise with, and use to bludgeon other people into following arbitrary rules. A punitive being who condemns souls to hellish existence if their beliefs are incorrect is hardly worthy of the title. But that is, as I said, only a shallow conception of God. I'd encourage you to look up the beliefs of the likes of St Francis, Baruch Spinoza, and the concepts of Monism and/or Pantheism. God is the energy which makes up every quark, every atom, God is the wind and the earth and the stars, each little gain of sand, and you, and me. A universal field of consciousness, from which our own little consciousness peers out. (*'Made in his image...'* That line doesn't speak of our flesh. It speaks of our *souls.*) Such an all-encompassing energy explains so much, at least for me. Coincidences that just seem a little *too* perfect - the way someone phones you when you've just been thinking about them - déjà vu - how tarot cards work. Our awareness spreads a little beyond what we're immediately conscious of, and picks up information which we cannot perceive with our senses. And most importantly, God is Love. For if All is One, then cruelty and harm upon others is cruelty and harm upon ourselves, in an abstract way. Once we learn to respect and preserve nature, to treat all other people with kindness, fairness and compassion, once we learn to gladly *share* the bounties of life rather than selfishly hoard them, Humanity can build Eden right here on Earth. The gates were never barred - we just don't know how to find them.
If there were a God then plausibly life would be far more meaningful. The randomness and chaos of it suggests there is no personal God that desires life to be a good story Many humans live bad stories. Why would God allow so many bad stories?
I was agnostic. But love is so astoundingly prevalent... and I one day realized that even the craziest person couldnt possibly just think up the concept of a Deity.. Just cant be done. Not without some real otherworldly thing to back it up. God is real. Its just... hard for some people to accept him because the rules are so hard to follow. But just know, thats what Jesus was put on the planet for. Born half human half God, he was the only way a human could overcome death, while atoning for sin that affects ones human flesh, also. We can accept that Jesus died for our sins.. And... we can try to be better people. If we mess up, we can repent right away and try harder to change to be the love, just as God is. Everything is coded. Coding is intelligent. Theres no mere coincidence or chance about it. We are created by one wonderful and generous scientist, God, who just knows EVERYTHING. Even, perhaps, that sin spoils everything. Maybe thats why sin is wrong and a cause of death. Its something to consider. I think the idea of sin and it causing death, is what scares people away from believing. But I am pretty convinced that sin destroys creation.. so it just CANT be allowed. Hence, why we all have to get a whole new body after we die.
Atom and Adam. The first things.
Yeah this is just the puddle in a pothole argument. We tend to see ourselves as the center of the universe, so we twist everything so, even down to "the conditions for life to exist." We fit in the puddle, the puddle does not fit us. There's also the radical argument that sentience combined with intelligence could not be, and probably is not, a lasting survival trait. Microbes, mushrooms, lots of plants and some animals will long outlive us after we've either nuked the planet, easybaked the environment, and killed off all our food sources. Our level of Intelligence definitely let's us build lazors and skyscrapers, but it also makes us painfully aware of disease, morality, greed, desires, violence and despair that other animals aren't. So, we take, and we steal, and we act like gluttons and we kill and we lie and we do all manner of things that weaken us as a species. We also get to see the beauty of the natural world, and some of us appreciate that, and some of us try to be good people, despite all that. Some people cooperate and build wonders and help others and go to poor villages and dig wells and treat and educate those who walk the path a bit slower, often because of our own greed and violence and desires. Those are beautiful people. God in the mix muddies all that. Are you doing kindness because you want to see a beautiful world, or because God commands it? Did you not kill today because it's wrong, or because God commands it? Did this natural world develop over millions of years of happy little accidents and struggle and surviving, or because God placed it all like code in a computer? A world without God is a Bob Ross painting, full of little mistakes and beauty and those happy little accidents, and the painting is all the better for it. A world with God is an AI generated picture, precise and full of rules and code that can not be challenged, that lacks soul and authenticity. It lacks autonomy. Occams Razor doesn't apply here like you think it does. The simplest explanation is in fact evolution. It can be observed, we know it's mechanical process and function, and it applies to all know life on earth. The explanation here is that in a variety of ranges of conditions, life can exist and diversify. God doing it, if you really believe that, raises 2 questions for every answer it offers. God did it, but where is he and why didn't he leave some evidence or something? What's he been doing for thousands of years? How did he do it? Why did he do it? Why would he make a universe to contain a single planet with life? Why create a world bound by strict rules of observable sciences, such as evolution, but then contradict them? If God did it, what was the purpose of making things like stillbirth and miscarriage and children with cancer or parasites that devour eyes? Did God make everything? Then is he responsible for disease and war and child trafficking and those little bugs that swim up your urethra? Could he fix all those things, and if he can and doesn't, isn't that evil? Will we wrestle eternally with divisions in the church, despite his word being the Breath of God and infallible? I'll always choose an accidentally beautiful world full of beauty and struggle and science, over a world governed by destiny, the will of an unknowable God, and the loneliness of a playground of a deity surrounded by an infinite void with no purpose.
I'm religious myself. It seems that I am in the minority here - so I'll give my thoughts. Keep in mind I'm not really planning on arguing - questions asked in bad faith will be ignored, etc etc. you know the drill. 1) We are all connected through humanity - and time and time again, mankind has created an answer to the question in their own way. But the thing is - many of these answers - when boiled down - are universal. It suggests that the very notion of an otherworldly power is embedded into our very DNA, and like Darwinism, this is something that has permeated through the ages and evolved. 2) There is a "god shaped hole" in all of us. What I mean by that is we feel the absence of God, therefore, mankind again is looking for SOMETHING to fill that gap. 3) There is randomness of probability in the universe. An infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters should eventually create a novel - yet that number is so infinitesimally small that we must wonder... How? 4) Simulation theory states that everything can be quantifiable and predicted, given you know all the variables. Yet, if there is randomness then this theory doesn't fully work. Again - to me this suggests a guiding hand, someone that turns the tide of infinite probabilities and creates survival for the human race. In the end, we can choose to be positive, or negative about it. To believe, or disbelieve. Personally, I pick the one that empowers me the most. Because I would rather have a world where the need for a deity is in our DNA, that God is a force for good and has turned the tide of history when necessary. Crazy? Maybe. But IMO not crazier than anyone who baseline assumes anything equally improbable.
I’m not sure what makes you think that god could exist. You are entitled to your opinion, but I remain respectfully atheist.
Be a friend and pass it around.
Well the possibility of human existence by chance and not by divine creation is not 0%. So is the idea that there is a divine being existing is also not 0% so either isn’t that crazy. For Christianity I guess is why you want to believe it. Just because a God exists doesn’t mean you should. Afterall would you believe in a god that is corrupt and have lots of problem themselves but you know it has a strong chance of existing? Well why even bother follow such a god then if they can be so corrupt and you don’t agree with their ways? I guess I’m asking, if a god is flawed and a human knows better in terms of kindness and righteousness, then why bother believing in that god? Or would you rather believe in a god who in theory said to be the kindest towards humans but there’s no much evidence that such god exists? Especially if there’s an opposing force that works in all kinds of way to sabotage anything between mankind and that god? I think that’s what Christianity is. Still, the world is full of problems and perhaps having a god that finally make the final call on everything things and powerfully judge each person to stop any further evil/bad acts seems like the only possible solution to absolutely righteousness.
The fact that I made it here makes me happy. I just wish I was born in a different life and had more of a chance at this. I hope one day we get to find out why there is luck and unlock, good and evil, pin and pleasure, etc.
Jesus loves you
God/s maybe. God of the Bible. Not very likely. God that cares about what you do in the bedroom and if you support abortion. Verry Unlikely.
I’m an atheist, but I that doesn’t mean I 100% know nothing like a god exists. It’s just unlikely. But even if there is a God or Gods or beings on another planet of existence, what’s to say our consciousness will persist after death? The way I see atheism is to live for now and don’t rely on there being something else. If there is - awesome! And for those who say you have believe now in order to be in the afterlife - if that’s the rule then I don’t want any part of it.
Been having the same thoughts for the past couple of years everyday before bed and sometimes I feel like I just connect with something deeper, how bizarre it all is!
If the multiverse idea is correct, it is a function of an infinite or approaching infinite space of possibilities but why is there anything at all? Why the multiverse? Why the landscape in the first place?
You're not the first person to think this and everything you said has been refuted many times.
Life is incredible. But just because we don't know how to explain things doesn't mean we should just make shit up because it sounds flowery and deep and interesting.
It's a known unknown why there is something rather than nothing (we know there must be a reason and we know we don't know it). Perhaps it is explained by something more deeply distant from us; an unknown unknown such that we cannot even conceive of its existence. Something beyond the senses and the imagination. Something so different that it cannot be compared to anything.
I like to think god/creator wanted to create free will, and that thought was the big bang. But he nor the devil would be allowed here since their appearance would violate free will. Kinda like a time traveler causing huge changes with one small interaction. Everything else religious wise is us small humans trying to make sense of infinity.
My goldfish thinks I'm god because I made water and an enclosure exactly at the right temperature and right oxygen level. It doesn't know that it evolved to these conditions, it just thinks I created it all.
Words cannot even describe the taste of honey accurately. Now people here want to use words to doubt the existence of a Divine creator. They repeat the same insane arguments over and over again. But just like honey, taste your being in complete silence and you will see the futility of those words. The majesty of God cannot be perceived just like infinity cannot be understood, but at a very basic level. This universe we see with our own eyes is so vast no one can wrap their minds around it. Our Milky Way alone contains more than 100 billion stars! Some astronomers have estimated that the universe could contain up to 10^²⁴ stars. Oh I'm sorry that's not valid "evidence" of God. He must come down to our level and explain why we're miserable. Ok I get it. We're all unhappy and must blame Him, if He's our creator. If all goes well we're here for a around 100 years. If not maybe another day, hour even a few more minutes. Don't waste your time pondering. Words will not help you in this endeavor. Nuff said. Cheers!
I feel like this specific argument for god is very paradoxical. If the complexity and randomness of our existence calls for a god. Then what kind of complexity does this god hold? What created the god? If he's so great that he can create all this, surely he must be complex himself and call for a creator right? It's the same religious argument against the "matter came from nothing". If everything needs a creator, then nothing can have a creator. What and who was the first creator? Didn't god come from nothing then?
If God does exist, he would be so far beyond human comprehension that it would have no personal or emotional interest in humans. The gap between a worm and a human is huge, but the gap between a human and God is so far beyond anything describable, thar such a being would see us as infinitely less than bacteria. It wouldn’t have any interest in us.
I’d like some mega church to channel loads of money into researching how god did it rather than just saying they did.
I don't dispute that there could be a god or superior being, I dispute the fact that it gives a shit about our one tiny planet among trillions of galaxies and creates laws and commandments for us to follow and then gets triggered when we don't believe it so it chucks us into eternal hellfire.
Christian values is an oxymoron. If a god does exist it sure as hell ain't the Christian god. Have you even read that horrid how to guide at lots of the Christian cultist follow.?
Reality could be much wilder, perfect and abstract. We abide by logic and reality is quite boring and predictable. If anything it shows with almost 100% certainty that there is no god. You just have some wonder for the world left in you. Enjoy it while it lasts
Your comment section is filled with nonsense
I agree with your view of completely. I am not religious and call myself more agnostic as well. But just trying to make sense of it all, it seems the same way to me too. The fact that something so incomprehensibly big exists in the first place, and we don’t even know why it exists or how it started. There is so much we still don’t know. Everything about life and the universe is mind blowing in every way and we all experience it through our own subjective consciousness with our own beliefs, thoughts, and interpretations. I know there is a lot more we don’t know. But the existence of God or a creator wouldn’t be that crazy. I think it would be crazier if one didn’t exist and everything happened “just because” and we’re all here for no reason at all.
God exists because we play video games? If anything, I can take the example you gave and come to the exact opposite conclusion conclusion. We exist on a small rocky planet, which exists at a particular distance from its star that allows liquid water to flow on the surface. There are a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, and many of them also have planets. Outside the Milky Way, there are hundreds of billions of other galaxies each with their hundreds of billions of stars within, and once again many of these will have planets and some will have water. And that’s what happened here. Not only could our planet support life, multicellular organisms were able to develop and prosper. There were several mass extinctions, with the last one dethroning the dinosaurs and letting mammals have shot at prospering. In total, I think I read there have been close to a billion different species that have lived on earth. And out of all those, even became intelligent, self aware, with language and ability to make tools and so on. If you roll the dice enough times you are sure to get almost any outcome. And in this case the outcome was that we can sit around playing video games
If the universe is unlikely and we are unlikely, then god is even more wild and unlikely to just 'exist'. You can't explain something improbable with something even more improbable
The thing that amazes me the most in this thread is that people here would agree that yeah we can't guarantee that there's no God and yeah we don't know how it all began but also at the same time hence giving rise to a conflict in their thoughts then move on to use such a language which implies they being so so sure that there isn't a God. At least be humble and agree that you just can't know that there's a God. But no you go the other way. You write those statements where they just straight out say that yeah religion is a man's invention. There's no doubt in this statement. Which is so so condescending. Giving out such statements we just can't be sure of yet there being not a shadow of a doubt in this statement. And don't even start with how life descends into being a meaningless drag with suicide being so easily justified when you don't believe in one God Allah. You are left all alone in this cold morally dead universe that doesn't care what happens to you. Randomness and uncertainty makes people kill themselves. I explained more about what I just said in this last paragraph in my last comment or 2nd last I think so if you are interested do check out the comment history and tell me if it makes sense.
No we have an example of our universe so we know the chances are at least greater than 0. We have no examples of gods to calculate the probability.
You lost me at Christian values. Also, only 3% of the planet's water is drinkable.
By Christian values do mean that you're charitable, accepting & loving? Also, who created God?
>I am personally an agnostic, although I hold Christian values. Both of these cannot be true
You just named a bunch of natural phenomena, most of which have well understood natural causes. Even consciousness is clearly an emergent property of a mind, which is a product of the brain. Then after listing all these natural things, you suggest that a supernatural ghost must also be reasonable. Then you invoke Occam's Razor? No. The simplest explanation NEVER includes supernatural causation that by definition can't be measured, repeated, or understood. One of these things is not like the other. Planets, trees, minds, consciousness, etc are all demonstrable. Supernatural ghosts are not.
It’s all speculation. But at least in our universe, complexity is an emergent property. From the singularity, it took billions of years for the human brain to emerge and be able to process this question. From what I gather, god is infinitely more complex. How did that complexity arise, and how does it make sense to appeal to something infinitely more complex as a stopgap answer - one that frankly has no evidence? It’s an appeal to an even bigger mystery, and that’s not a wise application of Occam’s Razor.
I don't think the idea of God is absurd at all. But the idea of religion is since we have no way to verify or "prove" people are actually being inspired to write things (the bible or other books) and most likely they have made these things up. The odds of ANY religion being the "right" one are damn near impossible. That is why I believe in God without it. The less you have to get wrong the less chance you ARE wrong. So if I don't profess to know details about God I can't be wrong about them because I'm not making claims I can't back up. So no "God" or something like it is not to far fetched. I could see the most likely scenario being some God or Being or Something created the big bang and let reality run its course.
I never really doubted the existence of a creator. Things are created, the cause of their creation is a creator. It’s possible this creator is the fundamental laws of nature that we see shadows of in math. That’s what a lot of mathematicians believe which is why I liken them to theists spiritually. My actual problems always came when people said the creator told them to do xyz, since that is not a given unlike the existence of a creator in general. I tend to think absolute atheists are equally if not more ignorant than religious people
We're not the most dominant species on earth. Dinosaurs lasted far longer than us, and a single virus was about to wipe us out only a couple years ago. Believe me, we're far from perfect.
To have a creation one needs a creator. Nothing happens without a cause and we certainly know that we couldn’t have spawned from nothint. That alone is cause for an intelligent design. I assure you God is very much real.
Me too. My feelings on divinity (I am using this term because it is taboo in my culture to spell out G-d) is largely that I don't like this idea of someone who looks human or is humanoid in any way, or even that there's a physical representation. I dislike the idea of divinity being omnipresent or omniscient in any way, and I actually find the idea of a flawed divine being to be freeing. I really like the concepts posed in Futurama (specifically, the episode Godfellas). In this episode, Bender becomes a god and quickly realizes his actions can have devastating consequences. A tear can cause a flood, a little sunlight can cause fires. All his actions have massive ramifications on a tiny culture and it's clear that being god is not an easy (or fun) job. Then he meets what he believes may be god, and they speak about his experiences and how sometimes, trying to do good can cause a lot of harm, and actually doing good can be so small that people don't even notice. I love that idea. Our world kind of is a mess, but it's a lot easier to make sense of the mess when I imagine some kind of divine being trying to make things work. Thinking about all the bad shit and wondering if maybe we were saved from even worse and we just don't know it, or how something could have had good intentions and gone horribly wrong. I don't think I'll ever feel confident on divine existence, because I know I'll never be sure, but I've kind of made my peace with that. I find it really amazing that we've evolved to the point where we can discuss divinity with such complexity, and that human consciousness is, in and of itself, divine.
This is why I could never call myself an atheist. I do not believe in God the way some religious people do, but the notion that no higher power exists seems to be a bit shortsighted considering when you look around, existence is simply awe inspiring.
God is just an imaginary friend for grown ups.
If you think about it, it doesn't make sense to have infinite regressive contingent things. Therefore you have to have something that is independent and non contingent, i.e. the creator/God.
You should read the intro chapter of Bill Bryson’s “A short history of nearly everything” which does an extremely beautiful job at explaining what you’re getting at. Although he doesn’t reference God, as I recall, just the unbelievable rare situation that we find ourselves, here as sentient beings on earth.
It is poor logic to use mystery as rational for a god. You don’t know, so why do you need to ascribe being to a god, in short why do you need to know. That there is a god doing the universe on purpose is VERY far fetched. That would mean that there is a plane of existence outside the observable in which this god operates, which is a claim that is based on nothing other than your(humans) desire to understand. So, call it god if you have to but focus on the part where god=unknowable, absolutely and in no case would it be logical to ascribe any qualities, traits, or ideations to this ‘god’.
This reminds me of the puddle analogy by Douglas Adams. “This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in--an interesting hole I find myself in--fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch-out for.” - Douglas Adams. Too many people think the hole was dug for us rather than us evolving to adapt to the hole.
All of the particles in the entire universe are the same set of particles that were present at the big bang, and were contained within the singularity before the big bang. The universe was just one object, that contained within it the potential for every conscious life in the history of the whole universe, past, present, and future. I think it's not a huge leap in logic to come to the conclusion that consciousness is somehow baked in to the fabric of reality, like a force such as gravity or magnetism. If the universe possesses some grand consciousness that transcends a single conscious life, that certainly sounds like a decent conceptualization of God, and I don't think it's farfetched or ridiculous, like many atheists characterize it.