Giant thread of convince-me-not-to-be-a-theist (page 2)

DS211

Haha thanks for my Giant thread!! Im doing just that though. I have to question. Why would "God" give me reasoning or why would i evolve into such a being if i was not meant to ask thought provoking questions...and if its true it will measure out and withstand. Right?

DS211

Oh and this is t just for me...its for others on this sute who want to ask but may be afraid to ask

OnTheWayOut

So you want us to sum up nicely, the sum of all understanding on these things.

Start youtubing Steven Hawkings, Richard Dawkens, Christopher Hitchings, Sam Harris, TED talks, the Atheist Experience, Theramin Trees, Dark Matter 2525, Neal dagrasse Tyson. Follow the links to the side also.

cofty

Evolution does not prove there is no god but it does make god redundant.

Theistic evolution of the kind that Francis Collins and Keneth Miller believes in does not contradict science. The problem is that most people who claim to believe in theistic evolution actually don't. They can't stop themselves pontificating about design.

Personally I reject god for other reasons.

1. The world looks exactly as we would expect it to look if there was no god. When "shit happens" explains the world perfectly what need do we have of theology?

2. The total hiddenness of god is impossible to explain.

3. The problem of suffering has no sensible answer. I am sure I have read every possible version of theodicy - they are all vacuous. "Natural evil" is a particularly strong argument aginst theism. It is worth remembering that Homo spaiens with mental and emotional capacities just like ours have been suffering for over 150 000 years.

bohm

DS211:

things that arent living produced living things,

Life is at its core a chemical process with certain characteristics. Please read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis and consider that, sure, it is full of speculation because whatever happened about 4 billion years ago is very unlikely to leave any trace, but is it really that much worse as a potential explanation than the clay-and-magic theory?

nothing became everything (gradually). For example if there was a big bang that started it all....from a particle how did everything somehow fit into such a unique position, and without these positions life would not exist.

Not sure what you mean. We have a quite complete picture from what happened a few microseconds after the big bang to now (again, check out wikipedia, just start with the big bang theory). You do not need to start from "nothing", why do you think that?

It is considered the biggest problem in moden physics to answer why big bang happened, a very basic reason is we do not have a theory that does not break down *near* big bang conditions.

But keep in mind all that is needed is a very dense state of uniform radiation that expand very rapidly and (13 billion years later) you get galaxies and planets capable of supporting life though a fairly well-understood process. Why presume god is the best (let alone only!) answer to how such a state could arise?

For instance, everyone believed the solar system had to be made by god. Today we know solar systems are formed by natural processes and this has happened billions of times. I cannot think of a single example where we started out believing God was the best explanation for something and it was later confirmed to be the case.

OR why does man create things? Why is it in his nature for creation?

To get food. Animals also use and sometimes create tools.

no doubt this creative thought could have created the God or higher power which many different cultures claim. But then if God never existed then where would all these ideas come from? Human imagination?

You mean something like Scientology is NOT obviously human imagination?

why do humans imagine things and other things not?

Well, humans have brains that has the capacity to imagine eg. other other minds. Perhaps chimpanzees have a religious life? how would we know?

yadda yadda 2

You make some good points DS211 but nonetheless the objections to classical, Biblical theism are so strong that it really only leaves a choice of Deism if one still remains convinced there must be some higher intelligence responsible for our existence.

But if that higher power is totally non-intervening and totally hidden and cannot be proved or disproved, it is a pointless debate. God may as well not exist, logically only leaving atheism as the only rational philosophical and scientific choice.

For this reason Buddhism, Taosm and the eastern religions teach that questions about the existence or otherwise of 'God' are ultimately fruitless and not worth pursuing. The answer then is to turn inward for our spirituality. We observe that human beings have certain universal archetypes that either evolved or were implanted in us. You could say its within our DNA or you could say its something else broadly described as a 'spiritual' side to us. In this sense, 'God' could be seen as an anthropomorphic projection of these universally imprinted spiritual archetypes we all have. To put it even more fundamentally, 'God' is simply our conscience, or the 'law within our hearts', that the apostle Paul alluded to at Romans 2:14.

confusedandalone

Dear Jesus,

I am writing you a letter today. When I am finished I am going to throw it in the garbage because at least I know the garbage is real.

confusedandalone

also, for hundreds of years god only cared about the Hebrews and no one else.

J. Hofer

> If you could teach me one thing to convince me not to believe what would it be?

believe what you want. but ask yourself what evidence do you have for what you believe. a random collection of ancient books on hebrew mythology? some nutters telling you god speaks to them? in any case, if you wonder why some people think they know more about god than you do - they dont.

> For instance what has the WT taught about evolution/science or mans existence that is wrong and could possibly change skmeones mind?

pretty much anything the WT teaches about evolution is utter bullshit. evolution is everywhere, right before our eyes. some virus becomming immune to antibiotics? that's evolution, baby.

> And the more important question, why is it a creator couldnt allow for species to evolve?

evolution can coexist with a theistic belief. but why go only halfway. there's loads and loads of evidence for evolution. what's the evidence for some personal god who made bronze age barbarians copy established laws from other cultures and call it the one true thing again?

adamah

DS211 said- Ok this is it. If you could teach me one thing to convince me not to believe what would it be? For instance what has the WT taught about evolution/science or mans existence that is wrong and could possibly change skmeones mind?

Take a look at the WT pamphlet published on the subject of evolution ("Life-", something or other, I cannot remember), and look at the footnotes at the bottoms of the pages: in their efforts to disprove evolution, they cite expert scientists who believe in evolution, and it's all disclosed in the footnotes. Why do they do that? They're counting on the average reader NOT looking at the bottom of the page, and if they DO, not thinking anything of their disclosure that the scientist they quoted to disprove evolution is an evolutionist. That's called cherry-picking, and it's intellectually-dishonest to do so, and they get around that by disclosing their practice in the footnotes.

DS211 said- And the more important question, why is it a creator couldnt allow for species to evolve?

You'd have to rewrite Genesis, then, since the Creation narrative clearly says that God created ALL living animals in finished form ("according to their kind") in a single day.

Genesis does NOT say that "God created single-celled organisms, and allowed them to evolve over the course of billions of years."

Adam

Giant thread of convince-me-not-to-be-a-theist

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