A question for the Athiests.... (page 2)

bikerchic

Alan:

I have a question for those who believe in God.....how do you feel that Godcame to be?

There is no God!

Kate

LittleToe

Alan:IMHO either answer is unsatisfying.

Where did God come from?, or What inanimate process started it?

The main advantage with the "God" hypothesis is that you aren't limited to "Him" consisting of biological life.

Wallflower

Isn't that like asking how black became black?

We are here, and that's it.

We are only 100 years into the technological era and look at what we know. Give it a thousand years, if we last that long, and ask the same question again. How did life come about? It's easy as a Christian, we were created, it says so in a collection of books about 2000 years old. As a rational human being I'd like to be a bit more realistic - it's an academic question, how did life begin, why did the dinosaurs die out, what is dark matter? We are here, how we got here is academic. It's interesting, puzzling and one day some academy will figure it out, but I sure as hell am not going to think the future of my soul depends on how the first amino acids came into existence.

IMHO of course.

Elsewhere

For me it is a matter of a simple question:

Did life arrive as a result of an all-powerfull deity that created everything but cannot be seen or communicated with or detected by any means..... or that life evolved through natural processes.

I have to go with the natural processes option.

I litterally have no sense of the "supernatural". I don't "feel" god or anything like that. I know that a lot of people do feel this... but appartenly I was born without the "god pod" of cells in the brain that allow people to experience such a thing.

AlanF

Hi LittleToe:

: The main advantage with the "God" hypothesis is that you aren't limited to "Him" consisting of biological life.

I think that supposed advantages of one option over the other are irrelevant both to the real answer and to our search for it. We know so little about the universe that making specific claims -- as if we really knew anything -- about ultimate origins is an excercise in futility. We really don't even know enough to say objectively that one hypothesis has an advantage over another. Of course, one hypothesis may well be more comforting than another, but our personal comfort with hypotheses is notoriously irrelevant to their validity.

AlanF

blacksheep

Technically, I'm not an atheist, more of an agnostic. But as an agnostic, I don't believe we can really KNOW how life came to be. We werent there.

That said, the here are some of the reasons that I DON'T think an ominipotent god created us:

Only in the last century (really the last decades) have humans developed and unlocked keys to health care which has allowed the lowest mortality rate and longest life span ever.

Up until then, particularly with the dark ages, bubonic plague, etc., people had little chance of making it into their 30's. And if they did, the likeihood that they would have some debilitating disease was extremely high.

With that knowledge, man was little more than a step above animals. An intelligent god who actually LOVED and watched after his creation would not allow that to happen.

The vast existence of fossil records which is now directly disputing the "creationist" theory.

I**I've come to the conclusion that if a god does exist, he either is not ominpotent (can't solve all the problems); or he doesn't care to (apathetic); or he's really a jerk who enjoys seeing people suffer (pretty much like the gods of ancient Greeks and Romans)

I don't buy the "Jesus died for your sins" crap. What smart god would send a man down to earth; have the sh*t beat out of him; hang him on a cross to due a tortuous death so that he would "die for all men's sins." Now THAT'S a stupid god. Anyone who is family with mythology knows it's simple a throwback of the "sacrifice to the gods" ideology. Makes no sense in the real, intelligent world. Makes a lot of sense in a world where you were just trying to barely survive and subject to the whims of nature.

Carmel

golly, when will folks ever stop confusing change (evolution) with origination? Evolution has never tried to explain the "origin" of life. It has simply identified a method of speciation through adaptation to changing environment.

carmel

Stefanie

After lots of soul searching, I decided that it just didn't matter to me. It was very freeing. So, really, I don't care how we got here. Now I just wonder, how do I make the best of my time while I am here? That's, imho, the real challenge!

Well put! Thats how I feel.

gitasatsangha

Carmel:

The two terms are not necessarily disctinct. The problem begins at defining "life". Is a virus alive? It meets some requirements, but others it does not. Are nanobes alive? Hard to say. What about Prions? I don't think there is currently any accepted "origin" theory that life spontanously came together in some sort of Stanley Miller reaction. Instead the idea seems to be that complicated chemical reactions which became self replicating, and eventually developed into something like mitochondria, then finally true cells. Whether this happened here, or one another planet like Mars and then was sprad to earth by metor bombardment is an interesting thing to ponder. Without a time machine or finding of fossils on Mars predating all fossils on Earth, it will be hard to say, and even then it will probably never be certain.

If the question is the origin of the universe, this gets to the point where theology and cosmology start to rub shoulders. I take the Buddhist standpoint that there cannot be a single causation. My reason is that there has never been a single causation demonstrated for anything else, so I can't except one for the Universe. This is not to say that the Big Bang did not occur, far from it, but the event was probably far more complicated then we understand at this time. All the same I don't expect any major discoveries in the matter to come from religion. They never have.

True North

I have a question for those who do not believe in God.....how do you feel that life came to be?

Well, I don't disbelieve in God and I don't feel confident that I know how life came to be but I do have some comments that I hope are apropos.

The physical evidence for evolution seems pretty convincing as far as I've looked into it as does the theory's explanatory power. I realize that it doesn't offer a first cause -- where did all the original matter come from that became the raw material for biological evolution -- but, then, I don't think it's really trying to address that or that it needs to. As for the first cause argument, I've often thought that if we say that everything requires a first cause then God does as well, while if we say that something doesn't need a first cause, then it might as well be the universe as God. I don't know how valid that argument is but as far as I've thought about it, it makes a certain amount of sense to me.

Will I ever feel more confident in the ultimate answers to questions of cause and creation? I don't know. Sometimes, I wonder if I really can, if I -- if we -- have the mental capacity to grasp it all. Years ago I saw a science fiction film directed by John Boorman and starring Sean Connery titled Zardoz (as in WiZard of oz). It presented some characters who had achieved physical immortality via science. As I recall, one of these characters stated that when first they'd achieved immortality, they were certain they would use it to unlock all the great secrets of existence but after long, long effort they'd finally had to admit defeat because mentally they just weren't up to it no matter how long they had. However serious the movie was or wasn't, I do think that is a pretty good issue it raises.

BTW, WT teachings to the contrary, many Christians see no contradiction between their faith and their acceptance of evolution as a fact, as God's way of taking care of business as it were. In fact, as I understand it, Pope Pius XII stated in 1950 in an encyclical that while he wasn't endorsing evolution, he didn't see it as being in contradiction with Christianity so long as it was viewed as God's indirect method for creating man's body but that the soul came directly from God. More recently, Pope John Paul II stated that the position of his Church on this had not changed.

Along these lines I would very highly recommend the book Finding Darwin's God by Kenneth R. Miller. Mr. Miller is both a professor of biology at Brown University and a practicing, believing Christian (Catholic it would seem). He has often publicly debated professional creationists -- whom he finds in varying proportions ill-informed, illogical, and sometimes dishonest -- and in the first part of his book, he addresses the arguments of various strains of anti-evolution creationists. In the latter part, he presents his attempt at reconciling evolution with Chrisitanity, free will, etc. Very interesting, very good stuff.

A question for the Athiests....

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