Proof that God exists? What do you think?
Offline I just got finished watching the debate with Kirk and Ray on ABC's Nightline.
Here are my responses to some of the atheists arguments:
Atheists don't believe God created the universe. They believe it just came into being on it's own. They want to know if we believe that God created it..then where did God come from? Who created Him?
I say...Here's your proof. We exist! We are real! That IS a fact! What we don't know for a "fact" (to keep this scientific) is how we got here. Your theory lacks tangible evidence and (for the sake of the debate) I'll say so does God(even though my heart knows otherwise). So, working off of that fact, if both theories lack tangible evidence the FACT that we are alive and here on this earth gives credence to the FACT that we were created. Any rational mind can concede to the fact that it only makes sense to believe in a Creator over believing that it all just happened by chance.
Brian and Kelly mentioned that if God gave everyone a conscience then why do we have people like Sadam Hussein, Hitler and etc? Those men and people like them also have a conscience they just choose not to listen to it. When God created us he gave us free will to make choices. He wanted us to be able to choose to love Him rather than forcing us to love Him and that meant giving us the will to make choices. If you have kids, think about this. Isn't it a much better feeling to know that your child chooses to love and believe in you rather than them being forced. With that free will to choose comes sin....because we are sinners. And along with that sin comes consequences(meet evil and suffering). Which leads me into my next point....
The United States was founded on Christian beliefs....the God of the Holy Bible. We have been blessed far more than most nations. Why do you think we have so many immigrants? The corruption that you see going on in America is a direct result of our country(which was founded on godly principles) choosing to disbelieve God, to disprove Him, to remove Him and to be(in His eyes) morally corrupt. And as Ray so eloquently put it, when you remove light(God) you have darkness(absense of God..ie evil, CANCER, suffering of all kind)
That's all I have to say. Thanks for the opportunity to voice my opinion.
Robin
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We exist, therefore God exists?
America is a Christian NationTM?
And the cancer bit. Cancer exists because we allow non-Christians to practice their religions/people don't practice the "correct" religion, and not because of mutations caused by genetics or cosmic radiation.
{edit - fixed typo}
Good night, funny man, and thanks for the laughter.
America, with 5% out-of-closet atheist, is has one of the highest crime rates in the developed world. How do you explain the most atheistic countries in the world having some of the lowest crime rates in the world, such as the Scandinavian countries, Japan, etc?
COUNTRIES BY MURDER RATE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_murder_rate
MOST ATHEISTIC COUNTRIES (from http://www.adherents.com/largecom/com_atheist.html):
Agnostic/
Nonbeliever in God
What do I think?
I think you took some hellacious leaps of faith and logic and have nothing to back them up.
Also, if your God is omnipresent then he can't be removed (as you claim Ray so eloquently put it)
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
Well, the chart isnt really fair. The only reason japan has such a high atheist rate, is because buddhism can be counted as a non-theistic religion, and if someone asks a buddhist "do you believe a god exists?", they would naturally answer "no".
But still, Japan outlawed Guns. Its illegal to have one. And that, by far, is a really smart decision.
This is a rhetorical question, but i feel like the answer is coming soon...
This is why your theory will never be accepted by science.
"god exists, because I KNOW he exists", is a poor defense. And certainly not evidence. A Hindu can also say the same thing. Does that prove Hinduism is the right religion?
Could you handle it if we were created by Vishnu? If the scientific community were to acknowledge that Vishnu created us, and not the christian god?
If a peice of rock was sitting on the grass feild, would your conclusion be "someone mustve taken that rock from the mountains, and placed it here!"? Would the fact that the rock exists infront of you, in the middle of a grass feild, be proof of your conclusion?
You can shuffle a deck of cards, and pick 5 cards. You can conclude that even if you were to shuffle the cards and pick 5 up, and retried this for a million years, that you could never pick up the same cards again, in the same order. However, that improbability does not discount the fact that youve already picked up the 5 cards in that exact same order already.
This trumps the improbable = Impossible theory.
Or, they chose to listen to their conscious, which told them what to do. havent you seen any psycho horror movie?
This is wrong for so many reasons.
Isnt it better to hide the gun than to let him play with it and shoot his brains out?
God was like the horrible parent who left the gun out, let adam and eve blow their brains out, and then stand over the corpses and twitch his finger back and forth, saying "I told you not to play with it. Now, its time for your punishment".
Sin is a concept to help explain other actions. If someone disagrees with you, and you obviously have the rational point of view, then something must be wrong with your opponent. Therefore, he is sinful, and you are not.
yes, the first amendment clearly was a conspiracy set up by those damn communists.
yes, your country has more deaths than any other. I guess you see that as "sending your countrymen faster to heaven"?
Well, we have to all agree, that the USA has the highest number of people being sent before god to either enter heaven or enter hell. They are surely blessed.
Cause of the first ammendment, which is clearly a lie?
Yes, the Attorney General john ashcroft, who set back the US democracy and human rights 100 years, clearly is a devil in sheeps clothes.
Cancer is the result of exposure to toxins, radiation, etc. It is not the result of sin. I doubt even Adam and Eve were able to gain a bullet to the head and survive.
I'm infallible. I don't know why you can't remember that.
You have a lot to learn, sir...
You made a false dichotomy (christians are obsessed with them), between "chance" and "creation". If you wish for a natural explanation for such processes by which we got here, look to what I wrote on the matter:
The point about creation is invalid and begs the question. As a poor rehash of cosmology, I invalidated it here:
The Absurdity of the Cosmological Argument
Cognito ergo dei? Never heard. As an a posteriori argument, it is invalid anyway, because it begs the same question. I proved that here:
All a posteriori Arguments For the Existence of God Are Intellectually Bankrupt
On the Problem of Interaction and the Concluding Piece of the Series: The Absurdity of an Immaterial Mind
Its a lot to read, but this is a hard subject...
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
I'll never understand why people think that adding exclamation points makes their argument true.
http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/yellow_number_five/science/9731
^While you're at it read that
We should thank God for shining his light on us, his perfect, holy, moral light on us-- God's guiding light was the foundation of the United States. God saved us from the darkness, freed us from suffering and immorality!
Thank you, God, for the greatness of slavery and racism in America. Because of you, God, we had the blessing of sexual inequality in this great country. We ask of you, Jesus, to come back and shine your moral light upon us, for the foundations of this country have crumbled, and women can vote. I ask you, Lord, to smite this atrocity from the face of the Earth.
Baby Jesus, I thank you for manifest destiny. I praise you for giving this country to us and bestowing upon us your holy blessing to kill the Native Americans who stood in our way, to replace their darkness with our holy light.
My saviour, I praise you for the gift of your holy fire, the holy fire given to the founding men of this Christian nation to set witches and heretics ablaze, burning them righteously, extinguishing their immoral darkness.
Yes, Robin, we need Baby Jesus to return, to save us from the suffering caused by humanism, compassion, and respect. These are not the principles our Christian nation was founded upon!
Pray, Robin! Pray hard! It is the only way we can receive Jesus! He must return!
Indeed
Correct
Which theory would that be? Is that the "theory" where I say
"I dont know how the universe started"
You see its not actually a theory. Its merely a statement of our lack of knowledge. I along with most other atheists really don't make any claims to knowing how the universe started. I really don't know?
No it does not it merely confirms that we exist. I'm not making any claims as to how we ultimately got here. We know evolution expalins how we came to be from simple bacteria thats a fact. How life started or the universe started I do not make any definite claims. Unlike you. You are claiming God magicked it into existence you now need to back up that claim.
Why? I really do not follow your reasoning. Why is it rational to beleive in a creator?
No it was not. You really want to read your constitution one day.
Well apart from all the other nations that have higher standards of living, lower crime, higher levels of happiness and lower poverty. All of which also have far lower levels of religion.
So America is not the land of milk and honey after all? Right I thought you just said that because you where pious you where blessed and now you say that becasue you are not pious you are cursed. Whcih is it? You might also want to expalin why countries like Austalia, Norway, Sweden, Switxerland, Canada, New Zealand and a host of others all are better places to live than the united states despite the fcat that they are all far more godless. Why does your god seem to love them more? It really does not make any sense you see.
Bye
You propose to know the answer to the most inherently unknowable question, yet you also say you are oh rational.
The most rational thing a person in this context can accept is that they don't know the truth. Sure, we take guesses but even the best guesses are just a shot in the dark.
You cannot be rational and hold on to your beliefs so tightly, that in itself is irrational.
You say that atheists believe that the universe just started buy it's self. This statement is just an assumption, I am an atheist and I have no idea how the universe started. the answer to that question is still under debate. scientists have very good theory's about what happened hundredths of a second after the big bag and the leading theory is that the universe always existed in the form of a singularity. they get this theory because that is what happens in black holes (read some Steven Hawkings). Just because we do not know what happened to set off the events that have led up to the universe that we know of does not mean that god exists and it especially does not mean that the god of the bible exists. religion has been proved wrong over and over again. for example, in the late 1500's a man named Giorgio Bruno, who was a monk, believed that every star was like the sun and had planets that went around it and every planet had life. the church found it necessary to burn this man at the stack. what a foundation for morals! anyway in the sixteen hundreds Galileo Galilei using his telescope made the observation that the earth rotated around the sun. the church found it necessary to silence him by placing him under house arrest for the rest of his life. The pope also made a infallible comment which means god told him that the sun revolved around the earth. my question to you is was god just messing with him? a form of cosmic god joke? religion is almost always wrong and if they are right it is out of sure luck and statistics.
Lurk moar!!
Easy there tiger!
You say that both theories on 'the beginning' lack evidence.
That means our existence doesn't give evidence to either theory.
That's fine by me. I don't use our existence as an argument against theism as I have different arguments. But it also means that you cannot use it as evidence for your position either.
Now you miss the entire point of Brian and Kelly's argument.
You say that it's an unlikely chance that the complex world 'just' came about without a creator.
But a creator capable of creating this world is even more complex so has even less chance of coming about by itself. So the atheist is relying less on chance than the theist.
Dude... I'm not even American and I know your history better than that!
Edit: Meh! We shouldn't have bothered! This guy looks to be another hit-and-run poster...
Since this person likely won't come back, not to mention that this has been answered about 27,000 times, when you guys are reading and it starts going down that path, do you ever get the adult voice from Charlie Brown in your head? I try to read it, but it just turns into *mmmrrrmmrrrmmrr!! mmrmrmrrr!!*
Atheist Books
I think I have a compulsive disorder towards replying to posts - even if the OP ran ten years back!