Just a poor proof-wanna-be of the claim that God is not exist!

Arrogance, Igorance and Stupidity.

Linear Thinking Impedes You.

That means that heaven is real and it means that Satan and hell are real. You can't have good without bad right?

The Bible tells us that if you don't believe in God then your going to hell but if you believe in God then your going to heaven.

That's assuming that there's only one possible religion, but any religion could be right, not just christianity. Some of those religions are mutually exclusive. So let's assume that you believe in Jesus, but it turns out the "true" religion was incompatible with Jesus' teachings, then you would go to hell (or whatever is the bad afterlife in the true religion).
Besides going to heaven doesn't always involve just believing, you have to do stuff, sacrifice time, effort and opportunities to do things that would help you in this life.
If your religion tells you that organ transplants are wrong and you die then you do lose something if your religion is false, your life.
Pascal's wager is not a very good argument in the real world where there are many religions.
And there was pollination before bees appeared, only it wasn't as effective. And bees evolved from wasps who ate other insects so by the time bees appeared flowers already existed. They didn't evolve at the same time.

Don't *beep* a *beep*...wait! beep? It was meant to say *beep*. *beep*!...no! not beep!...*beep

Well, I have to say that these arguments have been an enjoyable read thus far. I extend my deepest gratitude to you all.

I have a slightly different take than many of you may be familiar with or open to, but here goes:

I know God exists. Through meditation, deeper understanding of my own ego through self introspection, learning the freedom from the confines of the mind, and many other helpful tools, I've come to know this first hand. I've rid myself of many of the negative attitudes and troublesome thought patterns in life by not holding my ego so dearly. It's an experience of knowing the ease of life, the simplicity of everything, that eludes much of us.

I think that a creationist theory or a 6,000 year old theory is a unreasonable, personally. But here's my take:

Approximately 13.5 to 15 billion years ago, our Universe was much smaller and space did not exist. The Universe would have been a single point, condensed, or without dimensions, most likely. Time did not exist in these conditions. The reason I say that space did not exist, is because "space" should refer to the empty space that separates one object from another. There is no space that allows one thing to exist independent of others. That thing would exist without space, hence without time. When the Universe expanded, space was simply created at this time as it expanded outward and unfolded in the 3D realm. Everything came from one perspective or singularity.

As the matter world unfolded, life was eventually manifested within the Universe in higher and lower forms. This is to assume however, that life is restricted only to bacteria, plants, animals, humans, etc. There is always thought to be a single form of life that sprung into existence. I don't see how you could determine that rocks, stars, and other celestial bodies are not living things expressed at lower levels of consciousness. The Universe itself, could be conscious at a minimal level before intelligent life unfolds, so it should hold a collective intelligence. God simply becomes a label for the Universe under these conditions.

The oneness with things can be felt first hand if you experience it. If you learn to quiet your thoughts, not just use your mind for thinking, and feel the deep peace from within and the joy of simply existing. This is perhaps the closest way of experiencing objective reality, hence it gives many people a feeling of God within. This feeling can be deduced that it is a way of your being to directly SENSE/aka 6th sense and feel on an energetic, possibly sub-atomic level, the actual fiber or oneness that connects all things energetically. You can say, that you know God by feeling this oneness and origin in which everything came to be from one singularity. But, to say that you know God was a conscious entity or physical being who created the Universe or to say that God was knowing of the Universe before it unfolded, could be actually an error and going on blind faith rather than knowing.

For me, knowing God equates with knowing that God is a label for this feeling of oneness with all beings. This does not prove an afterlife nor the existance of a soul more than the implications of one soul, or one simple energy that connects everything. Under these conditions, many religious people and atheists would not like the implications of a God like this, because for religious people it might prove no afterlife and blind faith and for some atheists it might also negate every belief that they have and every opinion of theirs, as well as likes and dislikes as useless when they realize that they too, have no self that is not created in the ego. The ego, creates an identity through wordly possessions/materialism, other people, ideas, and is even greatly permeable by doctrines and knowledge passed down from others and grips at it as though it's your own truth, when it really isn't. The truth comes, IMO, in knowing that you don't know. There is no self, except the one. Independence, your mind created self that identifies with all things of impermanence and decay, and there is a true selfless, compassionate, and non-evil self that exists under neath this all. This is the oneness that connects all beings and matter. One and the same. It has existed before the ego and exists after.

Any time you find yourself with the need to be right, observe this and find that nothing is lost when you simply admit that you don't know. The egoic mind that identifies with matter and form and cannot sense the one simple energy that connects all things, or the string of all life, IS the actual evil in the world. This is what Satan can be compared to. The realization that there is truly nothing that is evil and simply is, and that our ego judges it as evil in a way to strengthen our identity and create more suffering needlessly, is where all evil arises. No evil existed before the ego nor will any survive after it. So, it's only natural that when you learn to control your ego, that you will generate compassion for the reward and "salvation" that it holds now. This is what salvation can be linked to, IMO, not an afterlife, but the transcendent reality of the Heaven that exists now.

You can say too, that somebody who feels alienated from all other life forms of this magnificent Universe, views their self as independent, isolated fragments that do not matter in the Universe, are really actually in a hell right now. This is the hell that exists in the mind and is a reality that only exists when you subscribe to the illusion that you are an individual and that nobody else feels pain. Suffering is shared by all things and much of it, unnecessary. So, I cannot say that any religion is right, that any is wrong either. Most of them contain valuable information on how to experience the oneness with all things and the reality the way it is most easily enjoyed, but are twisted by the human ego and manipulated in ways to control people.

Is believing simply to believe and hope you don't descend to some form of hell or ascend to a type of Heaven really believing, or is simply likened to the dog who behaves well for the treat that comes later? How can so many miss out on the greater knowledge and simple truth within biblical texts that point to all salvation and peace being had RIGHT NOW. In the present, not the past, nor the future. By adhering to the present and not empowering the past nor projecting your mind into the future to gain false hope or gain false misery by imagining that which often is unimaginable, you simply perpetuate suffering.

Psychological time cannot be used to place value on simply being and existing. Stopping to smell the flowers can be greatly understood when you realize this. In the time before our Universe arose, time did not exist. This feeling of oneness that can be sensed by everybody gives you the realization that the past does not matter nor does the future.

How do you explain people who predict the future or think of a loved one dying before it happens or psychics? Simple. They are tapping into the collective intelligence and oneness with the Universe. Before the Universe arose, there was no space or time, and they are basically defeating the illusion of duality and the illusion of psychological time and learning to perceive that which is only an illusory boundary created by us.

Since all the energy in the Universe expands, contracts, is reshaped, remolded, and everything lives and dies, how can MOLECULES....be likened to anything different than pool cue balls on a table?

10,000 years ago and 10,000 years in the future are no further back in time nor forward. They are simply points marked in existence. By realizing that all that exists is the present, you can simply look at them objectively as the Universe would and realize them as different molecular rearrangements! A table full of marbles arranged differently at different times and no real time at all. Simply arrangements.

So Science, really does have it's place and deserves to be respected as critically assessed fact to a certain extent. Spirituality is the science of learning to objectively sense reality without using the mind so much or the ego. This gave rise to religions, and those in control by their ego, gave rise to the fears and everything. Everybody is brainwashed to a variant degree by society and conditioning. Christians are a product of their environment as are Atheists. Something caused you to go one way or the other or persuaded you. Deprogramming yourself from what the media tells you to fear, what politicians tell you to like or dislike, and learning to THINK constructively, stop thinking incessant and compulsively, and liberating yourself from all unnecessary suffering and finding out that every thing you've done in life so far is not responsible for who you truly are within, and that all of society's roles are what make you your "identity" is the truest, most liberating feeling there is.

I don't know if God was a conscious energy/entity before consciousness arose or if consciousness gave birth to God. Is God the cause of The Universe? Is the Universe the cause of God? What I do know, is that any God that exists should logically prefer you to simply not know and want you to feel the integrated oneness with things first hand. The second your ego decides to place a label on it and say God is living or God is not. God with the ego becomes something while God without the ego becomes no thing. Admitting that you simply don't know and will probably never know in this life is the closest to the truth and the closest you could possibly come to knowing God.

If God = The Universe = You = Me, then omniscience, always being without a cause or end, and the concept of time as being confusing or even a non-subjective reality comes to the light. Life becomes lighter, you become more at ease, there is more joy to be had right now. You realize that the absolute truth = simply that knowing nothing = knowing everything. The illusion of duality from the original oneness always leads to more confusion when you simply can't see the origin of the problem. As in all of life, you will be doomed to repeat grievances unto others hence unto yourself from the alienation unless you do the dirty work and dig deeply within to find the causes. The unconscious mind and subconscious mysteries come into the light of truth and become consciousness. You awaken from this dream of a hellish reality to the world as it is. You realize that you were asleep the whole time and become fully conscious. Keep an open mind and be like water.

Sorry if I offend any Christian folks, but I could never say you are right or wrong. In it's purest truth, Christ is 100% correct in that salvation can be had right now. I believe that him and Buddha were a few of the truly enlightened humans that could experience this oneness in totality. You can only find your own truth in life and become your own creators of your own reality. Truly, live.

take Evolution and anything that supposedly proves it happened. who's to say that that so called "proof" isn't just being read into too much?

Who's to say? Scientists, that's who. As a community they cross check and criticize one another extensively. Mistakes and over-interpretations will always be made, but get corrected over time.

who's to say it's not just someones POV or perspective??

See the answer above.

No one can take the proof of evolution and claim that that supposed "proof" is 100% guranteed,

No one in the sciences ever claims that anything is 100% guaranteed. You are inventing a straw man.

Wow, that was a poorly constructed argument.

Not everything requires proof. But the more extraordinary claims do require far more proof than the more mundane claims. Saying that you held a sheet of paper for a few seconds last week requires no evidence because it's mundane in seemingly every manner : paper existed, there was no shortage, you are able to actually hold paper and so on.

That something has no proof doesn't mean that it does not exist. But that doesn't mean that it is AS likely as everything else which has been proven to have existed.

The claims for a god (or gods) include miracles, abilities, acts and properties which are clearly fantastic and violate mechanisms of both science and our current understanding of reality. Of course, our understanding could be wrong, but the probability is stronger that such god(s) don't exist.

That there is NO proof for either the god, nor for ANY claimed acts of the god, despite claims of abundant proof before documentary or evidentiary proof became the "norm" indicates that the most parsimonious conclusion is that god is clearly imaginary. Lack of evidence from claims of the Exodus, the Flood and so on lead any triangulation in inferential space to a point clearly discontinuous with the plane -- in other words, there is NO way such an extraordinary claim could have occurred.

On the other hand, proof is the overwhelming compilation of evidence that supports a unified model.

Evolution has such proof. It has geological, it has physics, it has genetics, it's got paleontology, it's got bio-informatics, it has virology, epidemiology, bacteriology, it's got dendrochronology, mycology, and so on and so on. We've got predictions made by evolutionary theory which have been successfully validated.

Evolution has been critically tested. Evolution has been subjected to demands for evidentiary scrutiny.

And evolution has, for over 100 years, passed each and every test.

It's not that there's a handful of fossils that could be put together this way, or that and that everyone says, "if ya put them this way, then it all works". Every aspect of each line of evidence for each item consistently supports the theory.

So, let's bottom-line this for ya :

God -- NO PROOF, NO EVIDENCE, NO MECHANISM, VIOLATES ALL OF KNOWN SCIENCE.

Evolution -- OVERWHELMING PROOF, EVIDENCE, WELL-UNDERSTOOD MECHANISMS, SUPPORTED BY EVERY MAJOR SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE.

Evolution and other evidential sciences are the "How" and religion is the "Why"; trying to argue for one while disproving the other just makes everyone involved look like an idiot...

Religious people would look less stupid if they actually behaved anything like your fantasy model pretends. In fact, this dichotomy you invent where science says "how" and religion restricts itself to "why" is just garbage. The religious have always claimed their beliefs do both jobs. Sure, a few modern theologians, realizing how badly they have been losing, have tried to invent this "why" sphere of inquiry to preserve a safe place for their nonsense, but it is still nonsense. There is no sense whatsoever in which religion provides even the slightest answer to any of these questions: why, or how.

Just try and prove me wrong by providing a "why" answer from religion that has been uncontroversially established as objectively correct. Good luck.

This movie sucked. What are we talking about?

Just because the existence of God (or a higher power or whatever) has not been proven does not mean that it has been disproven.

Get off your lazy ass and read some books about biology. There are thousands of transitional fossils out there that we've found. And the "dinosaur/bird thing" is not being argued about by serious scientists, only creationist retards.

One good source would "The Ancestor's Tale", which documents (backwards in time) all of the stages of human evolution, all the way back to the most primitive organisms we have records off. Each step is documented with evidence.

With all the resources available, there is no excuse for your ignorance.

lmfao dude that is the best post ive read on the DB lmao

im quoting that :D

Well, if religion stops interefering with science then perhaps they would get along better.
And no, atheists and religious people are not similar, atheism is simply a lack of belief in any deity and doesn't come attached with anything else really. At least this far there are no "holy" science books which one must believe in AND obey.

You said that because 93% of scientists don't believe in God the rest of us should get into line behind them.

Where did I say that? No where.

Look at my quote, shall we?

Here is what I actually wrote: “Hint: if there was an actual proof of god's existence, then why is it that only 7% of the most prestigious scientists believe in god?”

Indeed. You see, in the real world of scholarship, when someone comes up with something known as a “proof”, this tends to be convincing to his or her peers. Proofs produce a consensus. Proofs convince people. Proofs tend to convince everyone.

So, since we can look around and see that very few of the most prestigious scientists are believers, this tells us one definite thing: there has never been a successful proof produced by anyone for the existence of a god. Believers, in a word, have FAILED to give sufficiently convincing reasons to believe.

That is the current status of god “proofs” today. Are the critics absolute? No. But you have to judge ideas on their merits. And it seems that the god hypothesis is without merits.

Like I said, science hasn't proved anything, it has just given us some plausible theories, you can't use theories to disprove God.

That isn’t how serious intellectual discourse works. If you have a thesis, the burden of proof is upon YOU to show why it is more plausible than the alternatives. If you can’t then you can’t expect to be taken seriously. End of story. It isn’t up to me or anyone else to disprove god, it is up to believers to convince us to even begin to take such a ridiculous idea seriously. Believers have consistently failed in this task.

Okay you are still saying though that something is materialising out of nothing though, you are still believing in magic.

The models I talk are not magic. They have been worked out mathematically using some of the most solidly confirmed and reliable equations of quantum mechanics science has ever achieved. Calling something magic because you don’t understand it is not the behavior of someone who is genuinely curious about how the world works.

It has already been established that vacuum fluctuations can create particles out of nothing.

If you say that "nothing" is unstable, what created that law of physics to say that "nothing" is unstable?

It is a fallacy to assume that something needed to have “created” such “laws” to begin with. You are assuming a very outlandish proposition before you have established its own plausibility. We don’t even know if the laws of physics are the same throughout the entire universe, and there are in fact models which tell us that there are pockets of space time with completely different laws, of which we are just one. Most of those pockets have laws which would prevent organic beings from ever existing.

Also how was this "nothing" able to create matter?

I’m going from memory here, so I might make a mistake or two:

Hawking and Hartle were able to calculate the wave function of the universe and found that running it backwards you get to a point of infinite entropy where there is nothing physical or accessible. (This region involves so-called imaginary numbers in the equation.). It is completely chaotic. The ancient Greek roots for “chaos” are equivalent to an empty void, incidentally, so this region is understood by the scientists who have played with this model as a scientific approach to the concept of “nothing”. One of the properties of this region is that it has perfect symmetry, and one thing we know about symmetry is that it is highly unstable and tends to collapse randomly without a case. The equations actually run in two time directions from this point with ours going forward and a mirror universe running backwards. As it expands it pulls energy and matter out of the quantum field, and that’s where matter comes out of nothing.

We don’t know if this model is correct, but the mathematics work, and they are based on already successfully established science.

Here is a paper presenting the model in further detail—cut and paste into your browser.

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Godless/Origin.pdf

If theologians are allowed to say that God just was/is, why can't scientists say that creation just happened?

Um, I sort of said the same thing (which supports my position), except I added that scientists can explain what this means within a mathematical and evidence based framework, whereas theists can only pound the table with their faith. Big difference—BIG difference.

Scientists can but which one is more believable, a supreme being who created the universe with intent and design, or a universe that just materialised one day on it's own with no design or intent, just pure chance.

The second choice is more rational, since we have evidence for both the universe and the processes that would have created it out of nothing, as I’ve already documented. A being complex enough to have conscious intent would by nature have to start off highly complex, and anything highly complex is statistically unlikely to exist unless built up by gradual processes (i.e., evolution).

\Now I know I haven't proved God at all, and no one ever will, especially on an imdb board, but you are asking for facts, physical proof of a non physical being.

That is correct. I am asking for a model of a god that even comes close to the model I’ve already provided of something emerging from nothing via processes we already partly understand.