Why do you not believe in God?

[jerNYC]

I am not throwing God into evolution. We can both affirm that evolution happened in the exact same manner. You seem to think from the data of evolution I infer God, and then conclude that this inference is unjustified. However, I infer God on other grounds, and from the properties of God and the data of science would conclude that God planned evolution to happen. I don't feel the need to say that God tinkered with evolution. I would say that he set up the dominoes so that the random mutations he wanted happened. This would be before evolution ever occurred, perhaps even at the big bang.

When you state that, “I infer God on other grounds, and from the properties of God and the data of science would conclude that God planned evolution to happen” you are in fact, “throwing God into evolution.” The “properties” of God that you mentioned are vague enough to let you impose God onto evolution, the big bang, and any other natural process you please. However, you can’t actually explain God’s involvement in any of these phenomena. You can’t rationally explain how, “God planned evolution to happen.” This is merely an unsubstantiated claim and we just have to take your word for it that God was involved.

The difference between science and religion is that in science, when you make a claim, you have to provide a testable explanation along with it. This is the only way I have of verifying your claim. These explanations then build on one another and advance our understanding of the natural world. Religious arguments, on the other hand, do not follow the same rules. When you define God as vaguely as you have (spaceless, immaterial, timeless, and a being of immense power), you can use God to explain everything and anything you want - which ultimately explains nothing. By saying that God could have something to do with evolution because we can infer Him from a set of extremely vague values or because we can’t exclude Him from the process, theists are not in any way bettering our understanding of the actual process of evolution. God has as much to do with the process as Shiva, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. In that respect, God is useless to our understanding of the universe, since we still have to explain the actual processes behind these phenomena.

I don't expect you to believe based on my personal experience. However, I do not think that you can likewise discount my testimony of personal experience as you have not experienced it.

Yes I can. Claiming that one’s position is the right position because he or she possesses special knowledge that no one else has is the hallmark of religious thought. I on the other hand continually experience disbelief, but I don’t expect anyone else to take that into account when contemplating the question of god’s existence.

Your evidence for trusting the reliability of your senses is presupposing them, because for you to know that I exist and that reason is universal you must observe the world through your sense perception. You must trust what you receive through your sense perception is actually real in order to have any data with which to argue for its reality.

Again, I don’t understand this point. By “presupposing” I take it you mean that I’m assuming at the beginning of a line of reasoning that something is the case, which would ultimately make my case false. But the “presupposition” or begging-the-question fallacy is a rule of logic. In other words, you believe that by trusting in logic, I’m committing a logical error. This makes absolutely no sense to me. You’re trying to falsify, using logic, my position that logic is true. This is a paradox.

I know that “reason is universal” because here we are, having a reasonable discussion, following the rules of logic. If I were to assume that this wasn’t the case, and my perception was wrong and the rules of logic were false, we wouldn’t be here having this discussion.

For the sake of moving past this, I’ll accept your argument and call the mechanism that created the universe “God.” Now, why does this mechanism care whether I worship it? In other words, you now have the duty of imposing the other characteristics of the Biblical God onto this universe-creating mechanism. I don't see how that's logically possible.

If you grant me this, in your own words you would have just admitted that God exists. As I said, I would consider this moving in the right direction. I don't think I can convince you that Christianity is true. I would say that believing that there is a God as opposed to believing that there is no God is a big difference and be happy with that.

I accept that this God exists, since it was proved in your argument, but this God has nothing to do with the God of your religion. The God we proved is a mechanism that caused into existence all “space, time, material things …at the big bang.” It’s as god-like as any other mechanism that can be proved to operate in nature – from continental drift to natural selection. Why would anyone worship these mechanisms or grant them supernatural powers? I’m not sure that anyone would claim to experience a personal relationship with random genetic drift.

As I have argued, I think we can know things apart from argument such as the reliability of our sense perception, the existence of the past, the reality of basic logical truths, and possibly causality as well. It seems to me that you, and all others, accept these things as true apart from argument. Likewise I think it may be one way how we know God.

Like I explained earlier, I have no choice but to accept “logical truth” if I want to have this discussion. I do however have a choice not to accept a belief in the supernatural. My acceptance of “logical truth” has nothing to do with God, unless you can rationally explain otherwise.

If you had gone to a far off country and spent time among a primitive culture, you would have experienced their culture. However, say that their tiny living space burned to the ground, and all evidence was gone of their existence. You would not need an argument to prove that their culture existed, and likewise with God, your only evidence would be your personal testimony of experiencing them. In this case, the experience would be your only evidence, and not argument.

This is the classic disagreement between rational thought and superstition. In order to accept that this culture really existed, I would in fact need a rational explanation of their existence so that I could decide for myself whether it was true or not. I have no other way of knowing that your claim is legitimate.

Consider this: If I had gone to a far off country and spent time among a primitive culture, and they absolutely proved beyond any reasonable doubt that God doesn’t exist, and then their tiny living space burned to the ground, and all evidence of this proof was gone, would I not need that argument to prove what they said was true? Or would you just accept my claim that God doesn’t exist based on my personal testimony alone? Somehow I doubt that...