(June 2, 2014 at 8:34 pm)Sejanus Wrote: I always hear this question asked as if it's some profoundly deep philosophical conundrum that can't be answered.I think that as time goes on and human knowledge continues to advance and we keep discovering more and more about our world and universe, the fact that we do not ever find god leaves theists with no other option than to approach the matter from the other end-- is there a way to convince people that god has to exist? I think that most of the discussions here revolve around that idea, that the world cannot exist and cannot even make logical sense without god, therefore god must exist.
Personally, I think it makes no logical sense that a god that was so active and so involved in humanity and so downright IN YO FACE for thousands of years suddenly decided "bleh, the heck with it" and so completely and thoroughly disappeared that he left no trace aside from some very old campfire tales that were sloppily written and assembled into a book that doesn't provide the answers that its believers purport it to.
These questions --about meaning and purpose in life, about intelligent design, about metaphysics and NDAs and whatever else gets thrown around here-- are being discussed for the simple reason that god won't show himself and settle the issue once and for all.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
