[Aardwolf]

nuclear1, please disprove this statement:

I don't believe in the flying spaghetti monster.

[Ghostavo]

I believe the belief in God CAN be falsified and the believer willing to change his mind. All that needs to be done is to refute the solid philosophical arguments offered in behalf of God's existence (rather than simply offering some off-the-wall possible alternative explanation as is so often done).  If one could show me how it is more reasonable to believe that something can come from nothing out of nowhere caused by nothing fully charged with energy I would take one huge step away from theism. If one could show me a better explanation for our moral experience than theism, I would take another huge step away from theism. Unfortunately, however, atheists have not been able to provide superior explanations to theism.

The thing is, god cannot be falsified if you refute arguments in favor of it's existance. The same as you cannot say for certain there isn't a pot orbiting the sun between mars and earth.


Regarding the "origins" of the universe, I'm tired of people saying the universe came out of nothing. What do you think the big bang was? Hell, I'll just quote the first sentence out of wikipedia (just to prove how easy it is to disprove this).

The Big Bang is the cosmological model of the universe whose primary assertion is that the universe has expanded into its current state from a primordial condition of enormous density and temperature.

Regarding moral experience I can show you game theory and evolution.


The problem is not coming up with better explanations, as I've just demonstrated. The problem is with people accepting that those ideas are indeed superior to their religions' explanation and disregard it's dogmatic view of the world.

[jdjtcagle]

nuclear1, please disprove this statement:

I don't believe in the flying spaghetti monster.

If you say, "I do not believe in flying monsters" you are making a claim, are you not? We can debate over how much evidence/reason you must present to defend your claim, but indeed it is a claim.

Comparing the belief in God to the spaghetti monster is noting that just as you do not need to find evidence against the monsters existence to not accept it, you do not need evidence against God's existence to not accept it either.  The issue is not whether there is any evidence that mythical entities exist, but we have strong proof that they don't exist.  Absence of evidence is not at all the same as evidence of absence

[jdjtcagle]

The problem is not coming up with better explanations, as I've just demonstrated. The problem is with people accepting that those ideas are indeed superior to their religions' explanation and disregard it's dogmatic view of the world.

There are scientist with many views of the universe that keep out the possibility of the supernatural in the equation, because they feel it to be a "magic" answer to everything. But the inadequacy of theory A is not proof of theory B. Theory B has to provide its own support and be shown to have more explanatory scope, explanatory power, and plausibility than theory A.
God is not being invoked to explain what we don't understand, but rather to explain what we do understand!

[Unknown Target]

As soon as religion tries to support itself with "scientific" evidence, it opens itself to being disproved - you can't say that you have scientific evidence for your beliefs, and then not expect a scientific analysis of them.

Religion should stay just that - religion, and faith. That is acceptable, because you choose religion based on faith - however, if you try to compete in the realm of scientific explanation, expect to have some hard facts thrown back at you.

[Ghostavo]

The problem is not coming up with better explanations, as I've just demonstrated. The problem is with people accepting that those ideas are indeed superior to their religions' explanation and disregard it's dogmatic view of the world.

There are scientist with many views of the universe that keep out the possibility of the supernatural in the equation, because they feel it to be a "magic" answer to everything. But the inadequacy of theory A is not proof of theory B. Theory B has to provide its own support and be shown to have more explanatory scope, explanatory power, and plausibility than theory A.
God is not being invoked to explain what we don't understand, but rather to explain what we do understand!

I'm having a bit of dificulty finding your train of thought in your posts but, lets go on.

Scientists don't keep out the possibility of the supernatural because of that. They keep it out because if they didn't they'd be violating the scientific method.

The rest of your argument basically demonstrates my point in a way. There are literally tomes of evidence for the big bang and evolution, hell there is more evidence for evolution than for gravity. What little is there to explain doesn't prove that the theistic arguments are right.

The last sentence I'm not sure what you are implying, but if I got it right, that has no more validity than numerology.

[jdjtcagle]

Ghostavo and UT - I appreciate your opinions about evolution having more ground than the supernatural but that is for another thread... to go into detail would take more pages than I WANT to deal with personaly

I'm at work and will reply to this section later:

"Scientists don't keep out the possibility of the supernatural because of that. They keep it out because if they didn't they'd be violating the scientific method."

[Kazan]

nuclear1, please disprove this statement:

I don't believe in the flying spaghetti monster.

If you say, "I do not believe in flying monsters" you are making a claim, are you not?

you are claiming that you don't believe in FSM - nothing more, nothing less

"lack of belief" is the default logical position - it's a *lack* saying "i don't believing in X" is saying "I lack a belief in X"

so.. nuclear1's assertion is false.

[jdjtcagle]

I agree :-) but the point was trying to be made that the issue of God's existence is not settled simply because adequate proof for God's existence has not been provided (assuming such was the case). To settle the question of God's existence; to end the agnostic pursuit, one must have positive evidence that God does not exist.

[Kazan]

eh.. agnostic is more "we cannot know" rather than "we cannot prove"

given the complete and total lack of any shred of evidence of any kind supporting to the existance-of/need-for-existance-of a deity we can say "it is extremely probable that one does not exist" which is going further than simple "i do not believe in one".

[colecampbell666]

And I don't feel like looking for the RCAF.

Royal Canadian Air Force, not everyone is an American, sizzler.

And I'll be 16 next January.

[jdjtcagle]

eh.. agnostic is more "we cannot know" rather than "we cannot prove"

If were going to get technical agnosticism is not a position at all; it is an epistemological method/process for arriving at an ontological position... or you could say that agnosticism is the epistemic route of the individual, whereas theism and atheism being the destinations.

There are two main forms of modern agnostics those who say no one can know if God exists, and those who confess that they personally have not yet determined if God exists. Both are epistemological positions. The former says "I can't have an informed position," while the latter says "I don't have a position yet" and thus remains tentative on the question of God's existence.

Many people have a mixed up view of what agnosticism really is...

[Nuclear1]

nuclear1, please disprove this statement:

I don't believe in the flying spaghetti monster.

I can't.  That's a statement to your beliefs.  I can't change that. If you said there is a flying spaghetti, I would be happy to debate that till Judgment Day, since that is a debatable topic.

Kaz:

be·lief
–noun 1. something believed; an opinion or conviction: a belief that the earth is flat. 

You're saying you have no convictions or opinions?  You can believe that there's nothing to believe in--as weird as it sounds, that's still belief.  It's not Belief, in the religious/faith sense, but it's still having a conviction.

Even if you do want to claim not having a belief in X, you still have belief in Y.  That's maybe where my post was confusing--I was trying to say that you can't entirely lack belief in anything; you can certainly not believe X but can believe A, B, C, D...

[Polpolion]

And I don't feel like looking for the RCAF.

Royal Canadian Air Force, not everyone is an American, sizzler.

And I'll be 16 next January.

No. Every single person in the world is American. Canada is America's hat, Mexico is America's pants, UK is America's paper towel. You know what? Let's just call it Oceania and get it done with.

Of course RCAF is the Canadian Air Force. How could I not assume that when your shouting that you're Canadian left and right? Like I said, I don't feel like looking for the site, ie the eligibility, because frankly, they're not trying to actively recruit and throw everyone possible at Iraq, much unlike the US.

[/maketoobigofadeal]

[Hippy]

Orwell aside Oceania is Oz, NZ, & Pacific bowl islands incl Indonesia. Or at least it's an attempt at creating a region anyway.

On the God/Military thing:

If God exists then God loves us all (yeah?), therefore: God does not love US soldiers in particular.

If God does not exist then the question is moot and these people are simply loud and slightly annoying. But unless they cross the violence threshold we can do nor should we do anything about them.

[NGTM-1R]

no i don't believe that*, thank for you for demonstrating my point oh presumptuous one

* because it's damn near impossible to prove a negative.  Without evidence of any nature supporting the existence of one you still have no basis to believe.

So you believe that it's damn near impossible to prove a negative. Whoops.

[TrashMan]

What I find interesting is that science can't explain the Big Bang...it can't tell you what was there before the bing bang. It can't explain the creation of the universe..only the events and laws AFTER it's creation.

[Ford Prefect]

facepalm.jpg

[colecampbell666]

What I find interesting is that science can't explain the Big Bang...it can't tell you what was there before the bing bang. It can't explain the creation of the universe..only the events and laws AFTER it's creation.

They speculate that it was a particle of infinite mass/temperature.

The earliest phases of the Big Bang are subject to much speculation. In the most common models, the universe was filled homogeneously and isotropically with an incredibly high energy density, huge temperatures and pressures, and was very rapidly expanding and cooling. Approximately 10−35 seconds into the expansion, a phase transition caused a cosmic inflation, during which the universe grew exponentially. After inflation stopped, the universe consisted of a quark-gluon plasma, as well as all other elementary particles. Temperatures were so high that the random motions of particles were at relativistic speeds, and particle-antiparticle pairs of all kinds were being continuously created and destroyed in collisions. At some point an unknown reaction called baryogenesis violated the conservation of baryon number, leading to a very small excess of quarks and leptons over antiquarks and anti-leptons—of the order of 1 part in 30 million. This resulted in the predominance of matter over antimatter in the present universe.

EDIT: That's only the early stages, but still.

JESUS DID NOT MAKE THE BIG BANG!

[Polpolion]

What I find interesting is that science can't explain the Big Bang...it can't tell you what was there before the bing bang. It can't explain the creation of the universe..only the events and laws AFTER it's creation.

It certainly does a better job than religion .

Scientific conjecture: see cole's post
     How?: explained in cole's post

Religious "fact": God did it.
     How?: God snapped his fingers.

I don't know about you, but science offers a bit more of a reasonable, understandable explination.