Proof of God (page 5)

cofty

I have not heard of a serious alternative explanation involving unicorns

Just shows how narrow-minded you are.

blownaway

blownaway - As I said you are being a pedant.
Pink unicorns don't exist. God doesn't exist. These two statements are equally certain.
'Proof' in the sense you are using it belongs only to mathematicians where is equates to tautology.
When asked whether they believe that pink unicorns exist nobody witters on about proving a negative and claims to be an agnostic about pink unicorns. So why is the god question any different?

fYou miss the point all together. Its not a matter of what one believes. I don't believe in the god of the bibles existence no more than I believe in a 1953 Cadillac orbiting Saturn, but I also can not prove this. No evidence for is not proof of non existence of. Black swan events are because when something is not possible sometimes it actually is. So you can not say I can prove when you can not. Tell me you went to Andromeda and checked under every rock and did not find god? And the rest of the universe? No, So all you really have is the fact like Me that I have seen not evidence that there is a god. I can not say there is not some kind of supreme being or Aliens beings or flying spaghetti monster, I have seen nothing to show me they exist but at the same time I have no proof that some where in the universe they do. And neither do you. You are confusing evidence of absence with absence of evidence.

cofty

You are confusing evidence of absence with absence of evidence - blownaway

No I'm not doing that at all.

Proving that the god of Jesus does not exist is not difficult. It does not depend on an absence of evidence.

You are pedantically using the word 'poof' in a way that is inappropriate outside of the fields of formal logic and mathematics. You are also equivocating about the meaning of the word 'god'.

Actually a good case can be made that the god of xtian theism is also logically impossible.

JW_Rogue

ExJW here also. I am not an atheist because I can not prove a universal Neg. It would take faith to say you are an atheist. I am an Agnostic. I can not prove there is or is not a god but since I have seen no evidence of one, I tend to lean that there is not.

An impersonal God that exist solely as a power outside of our physical universe would be pretty hard to disprove. However, a personal God with a personality like that described in the bible is easy to disprove as there our many contradictions to his personality found in nature. To get around this JWs fall back on "Satan did it" and "Imperfection though."

JW_Rogue

Black holes, what kind of god makes black holes??

Maybe eventually the black holes eat up all the energy and matter in the universe and condense it allowing another big bang to occur and a new universe to be born.

waton

Krauss is very explicit about what he means by 'nothing'. He does NOT mean two energies existed balancing each other at all.

No energy, no time, no matter - NOTHING!

He uses 240 pages to redefine nothing, as a void seething with activity, virtual particles popping in and out of existence.

The Pre- Big bang workshop is full of potential. and we have not touched Roger Penrose yet.

The BB, and Evolution are latecomers to the saga of existence. The gods question even later.

venus

Black holes, what kind of god makes black holes?

Not only Black Holes, even the vast universe much of which is barren has a purpose.

In this more than 8 billion people we find today on earth, only a few lead a meaningful life whereas others go after bubbles. This is typical of everything we see around us.

1) See the composition of material universe! What is knowable/visible (which responds to the physical light) is only around 4% whereas the rest is unknowable/invisible what the Scientists call “Dark Energy and Dark Matter” (which do not respond to physical light) “which is a fifth and previously unknown type of fundamental force called quintessence, which fills the universe like a fluid” serving as a support to the visible universe. (https://www.space.com/11642-dark-matter-dark-energy-4-percent-universe-panek.html; https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/dark-matter/)

2) The ocean holds 97 percent of the Earth's water; the remaining three percent is freshwater 3)When we are awake some 25-40 thoughts a minute bombard the mind of which about 90-95% of those thoughts are waste, idle or negative.

4)95% actions we all perform are done unconsciously

History teaches that humans do not learn from history. If people were to change for the good, they would have done so after Buddha who found the folly of pursuing material goals which means majority would always want to inflate their ego. Very few would take lesson from the vast universe and the earth which is so insignificant in comparison to the rest of the universe. Such ones would take the lesson from vast universe that they should broaden their heart as vast as the universe rather their ego. For me, the vast universe with most of its parts being barren with no life is a proof that God exists because lifeless portion of the universe tells me “God must act for life to appear there.”

Ex-JWs Brazil

The Atheists here talk more about God than the average JW.

Even if God doesn't exist (compared to what?) certainly the idea of God truly exists.

This idea it's the most powerful idea in human history. People literally live and die for it. And a lot of time is spent discussing this idea more than any other.

How Atheists explain this phenomenon? Is it only a coincidence? Why the idea of God is the most popular idea in a Godless world?

cofty

How Atheists explain this phenomenon? - Brazil

The psychological reasons for belief in an invisible deity are not mysterious. One of the most obvious is our tendency to assign agency to random events. At one time humans believed that thunder and rainbows were acts of god. Famines are storms were assumed to be signs of his displeasure and of course having made the right sacrifices the storms passed.

We evolved from a long line of ancestors who assumed agency. Those who dismissed the noise in the grass as 'just the wind' tended to get eaten on the odd occasion that the noise was in fact caused by a hungry tiger. False positives are less costly than false negatives.

Then there is the understandable assumption that design requires an intelligent designer. Natural selection has made that belief redundant.

Worship of a particular deity also served important social functions. The 'hive instinct' that is triggered by religious rituals increases group cohesion. Belief in an invisible but all-seeing judge also provided a powerful incentive for good behaviour when other members of the group are not around.

Finally, and most obviously, is the desire to avoid death and the wish that the injustices of life will be put right in the next.

As an atheist that is a very brief explanation of how I account for belief in the supernatural.

P.S. - Brazil were very disappointing yesterday. 'Football's coming home...'

OnTheWayOut

SBF: For many people the idea of God explains why there is something rather than nothing, because he is understood to be a being outside of material reality who is the ultimate cause of everything that exists. For many people this makes more sense than simply asserting that reality exists and no further explanation is required or even possible.

Who said "no further explanation is required or even possible." People are searching for answers and Krauss's "something from nothing" is still far from accepted, but it's progress. We will get it one day. We will laugh at primitive understandings of dark matter/energy and the like.

So man created the gods to explain rain, lightning, sunshine, etc. Even as man developed, gods were a great explanation for anything and everything. Then science developed enough to start making gods less needed in explanations. We then had the god of the gaps- gaps in our understanding of how things happened.

Slim, we grew up as a species to the point where we realize that the god explanation is flawed. It just pushes back one level at the question of how we came to be. We would still have to explain how "God" came to be or accept that something was eternal or came from nothing.

I struggled with "If that eternal something had to be a god, is it because of needed care and guidance?" Well, between sincerely turning to God for guidance and winding up in a dangerous mind control cult, and looking at all the thousands of children torn away from their parents to die in a tsunami, and seeing senseless pain and suffering among people, I concluded that a caring and guiding god doesn't exist.

Man is still just living with the ideas of that same god who made the rain and lightning. But a group of control freak priests in the middle east twisted at the idea of god enough to add that "He" was nothing but good. Before all that, even "Jehovah" was a warrior god. And then it got worse- politicians in Rome trying to salvage their empire added Jesus to the mix and "How dare you attack Jesus?"

When a person tells me their prayers are answered, and that's proof-enough, I just fall back on tsunami victims and suffering humans and my own cult time. Yeah, that's proof enough to me that praying for small enough "miracles" leads to coincidences. And we are grown-up enough to stop believing in a tooth-fairy-type of god.

Proof of God

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