Why we believe

[robvalue]

Ah, OK. Well I wondered where all my bibles went. I used to have hundreds. I guess one of them is OK. Do they both eat bibles? I didn't find a corpse anywhere. Maybe they're both Ok, phew!

[strawdawg]

Conscious experience, I am redeemed. It's as simple as I can put it.

I think you should consider putting it less simple, in the sense of saying more than mysterious fragments, and relating something more of a coherent concept.

If you were willing I could gave you Bible lesson and you don't want that. It's off to work for me and I will think of a shorter way to answer your question.

[Alex K]

I've been doing it wrong for ages then

Do you have to feed your spirit, or your soul or anything? Shit, mine probably died ages ago.

Actually it does need to be fed, it feeds upon the word of God.

See what you did, rob? Pull yourself together!

[robvalue]

Lol God's throat must get awfully sore having to shout all those words into everyone's souls constantly. Doesn't sound like the most efficient system. No wonder he gets distracted easily.

[Davka]

The OP seems to boil down to "I believe because I believe, and the evidence is irrelevant."

That's the only thing I can glean from someone saying that no matter how we got here it has to have been the product of design. There's no logic there at all.

[ManMachine]

I don't think God can be understood with the mind, it seems like foolishness.

God is understood with the heart (spirit).

Your heart has no cognitive function, but I can see how basic anatomy is not important to the religious. After all, who needs a theological elbow when one converses with one's arse.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Hehe and what is pulling a Drich?

This is something I'd REALLY like to read about

---

To the OP: I have a deep sense of awe and wonder at this world. It amazes me to know that every atom in my body heavier than lithium must have been manufactured in the death throes of a star. It amazes me to think that when I look up at the nighttime sky, I am literally looking into the past, because the Universe is so vast that even light takes uncounted eons to cross it.

I don't need to make any stories about how it all came about, and I don't find your reasoning convincing. That doesn't mean that I take this Universe or this life for granted -- it only means that I find your reasoning insufficient to carry your premise.

[Minimalist]

It's just that some of us have a sense of wonder about the world and the universe.

Then don't look for it in a moldy old book.

Reality awaits.

[The Grand Nudger]

As for me, the importance of water, complexity of our body, the eyes and the brain make it seem like it was created by someone intelligent. That doesn't mean we don't try to find out how they work.
Also I feel that the big bang had a cause/source that did it and set events into place. So two theories arose in my mind-

Water is a great solvent (more so than any other naturally occuring liquid known), it is also nearly incompressible. If you have a requirement of transporting something, and if you have to deal with pressure - water would be the go-to substance regardless of whether it was chosen or just happened to be precisely what it is. The complexity you may see in your body is, perhaps, of a different sort than the type of complexity we commonly refer to when we use the word. I could build a hilariously complex mousetrap, or egg boiling machine. A Rube Goldberg. However, if our bodies or brains where Rube Goldberg machines, they would only be so by complexity through almost incomprehensible repetition.

So, water is where it's at for a creature like ourselves - because we have those requirements to which water is almost uniquely suited. There's no requirement that water be chosen by anything, as little (if anything else) would have done anyway..this "choice" if you want to conceptualize it this way, would have been made by elimination on this rock regardless. Had "god" chosen something else - without sustaining magic that life would have died - or, presented with life like our own, been outcompeted. This planet (and perhaps this universe) favors water-leveraging life by brute force. The complexity you see has no requirement of choice or intellect, because it's just a vast pile of the same simple pieces endlessly repeated. They could fall from the sky and land on top of each other and they would be equally as complex as they are now.

1) There was only a single way our universe would turn out and this led to the formation of life on earth (and maybe other planets).

If the universe were different, the universe would be different. This isn't a very informative statement, imo. Let me introduce you to the anthropic principle. If any creature finds itself asking a question (or indeed, existing) then it should be neither surprising nor informative to find that the universe it resides within is amenable to it's existence. If it weren't - if it were different, then it might actually -be- surprising to find life within it asking the question to begin with.

I've always thought that great evidence for the existence of some -undefined-but-possibly-considered-as "god" would be a situation in which we found ourselves, as we are, asking this question of ourselves and of others, from within a Pulsar. Now -that- might take some agency with vast creative and sustaining power to explain. Finding ourselves here, asking this question...simply does not.

Since there was only one way the universe could've gone forming over the 14 billion years it shines light on the possibility that it was a creator's intention for life to be born.

We only know that there was one way that it did, -not- that there was only one way it could have. Again, if the universe were different it would be different.

Conclusion- We were specially meant to be born.

I don;t think that you can get here, from there :looks up:

We are not an accident.

You can reach this conclusion without a god.

2) OR there were infinite ways the universe could've turned out in 14 billion years (because chaos) and out of all those infinite possibilities we got this one- where we come to life and evolved and are having this conversation.

There may have been many, but "infinite" is probably a stretch. I can;t tell you this for certain because there's no reason to assume that logical inference holds before this universe formed, or if some other universe formed. Logic is descriptive...and we only have one place from which to make descriptive statements. Here, in this universe...it simply isn't the case that "anything is possible", that there are infinite possibilities. Vast to the point of incomprehension, perhaps...but infinite...no.

Conclusion- We were specially meant to be born.

and again, even just in this universe - we can;t get there from here. No conclusion arrived at in this universe by a method descriptive of this universe can be trusted to hold "elsewhere". It may, there's just no way of knowing that.

We are not an accident.

As before, no god is required to reach this conclusion in this universe. Is this conclusion whats important to you? I know you started off by saying that you didn't reach your belief through some desire for wish-fulfillment....but it certainly seems like it might be a factor. -This- conclusion being -that- wish. Wish granted, regardless, btw.

That's my reasoning anyway. I'm not saying theists are right and atheists are wrong. I'm just saying people have different minds and different reasonings with which they make decisions for themselves. You believe it's practical to believe in what we sense with our five senses and what is provable. I believe some things exist beyond what we can sense and hence prove.

-and yet you saw fit to offer conclusions, an attempt at reason. You say that you have reason.....about things beyond your senses and beyond proving. I'm afraid that this simply isn't possible. Reason leans on sense experience (the rules of logic themselves are a description of sense experience...how this universe that we experience appears to behave), it generates conclusions, it proves things. If this is reasonable, you must have some experience to back that up, if this is reasonable - then it can be proven...even if you may not possess the ability to do so.

Fantastic post, btw.

[Grasshopper]

[quote='Grasshopper' pid='844004' dateline='1421124745']

Fantastic post, btw.

Ikr!
Yours too. Good explaining