Theism is literally childish

[John V]

Energy cannot be created nor destroyed.

If you're applying such laws, then you would also conclude that a universe existing as a singularity would continue to do so, unless acted on by an outside force.

On what evidence do you believe that an eternally existing god is possible?

The existence of a universe with a beginning. But note that I'm not calling you childish for your beliefs. I'm OK with different camps having different beliefs.

Yet it still shows us that the process is likely similar even if the conditions were not exactly the same.

Cool, let's see the evidence.

Define magic.

Why don't you ask emjay to do that - he's the one using it. I'm only using it with him.

How about some effect where the cause is not only unknown but can't ever be known?

How do you know what "can't ever be known"? I'm guessing it's just bias. An explanation involving a creator god can't ever be known. The mechanics of inflation - well, we might figure those out some day. If something is currently unknown, you can't know if it will ever be understood.

Think of the idea of wizards and you'll see that the definition fits. That is also the very hallmark of christian belief. No christian ever tries defining what a soul is, or a holy spirit, or what a god is or how it or prayer could possibly work. Because to do so means that you then have something that is falsifiable and can be shown to be false. You are the perfect example of this by not even trying to explain how your beliefs could in any way be plausible.

We don't try to define such mechanics because we just don't know. Similarly, you don't know how this vast universe could exist eternally in a singularity, what cuased inflation, or how life arose. Just because you speculate on such things doesn't make your speculations necessarily plausible.

Yet waiting for a statistically rare event has been shown to take time in practice on average. If I gave you a bucket load of 6 sided dice and you tipped them all on the ground, the probability of them coming up all 6's is a statistically rare event. If I gave you a task of doing just that, how long would you ask for to complete that task in the knowledge that you were likely to manage just that? This isn't magic, it's just a lower probability requires more time to happen on average. Now if we tasked every person on the planet to do the same thing, then we can calculate a much higher chance of success happening within the near future.

The difference is that we know the mechanics of how all 6s could come up, or how a particular lottery number comes up. We don't know the mechanics of abiogenesis.

That said, I don't even assume that life is a statistically rare event. Again it's the theists making the assumption to make it sound less likely.

It's not an assumption, it follows from your own belief of a single tree of life, and on daily observation in which we don't see new life forming.

We don't know that the universe had a beginning.

We're told it's 14 billion or so years old - that implies it had a beginning.

All we know is that at some point which we call the Big Bang, all energy and space-time was condensed into one small point. We don't know what happened before that. What we do know though is that since the Big Bang, energy cannot be created nor destroyed so is essentially eternal. All All matter in the universe has come from energy, so yes, the universe does seem to be eternal.

And again, if we're applying rules like the conservation of energy and matter, then we also should conclude that an eternally existing singularity would remain a singularity. We tried to get around this with an oscillating universe, but the rate of expansion of the universe didn't fit that model.

Adding an additional entity to explain what we observe is not in keeping with the principle of Occam's razor if it ends up relying on more assumptions as a result.

No, Occam's razor prohibits unnecessary assumption. In this case, if we had an eternally existing singularity, we would expect it to remain a singularity unless acted on by an outside force. As the singularity was the entire universe, that force is necessarily outside the universe, and so has at least some charactersitics of a god.

Your god character does exactly that and does not even help solve the initial question, it just pushes the solution further away like a homunculus fallacy. This is because the same questions that we can ask of how an eternal universe came into being can now be asked of how an eternal god came into being.

No, if we had evidence of an eternally existing universe, it would be nonsensical to ask how it came into being. It didn't - it's eternal. The problem is that the evidence indicates that the universe has not existed eternally.

[I_am_not_mafia]

OK, what's this concept of plausibility that I missed out on?

OK, teach me this concept of plausibility. Honestly it just sounds like bullshit at this point.

If there are multiple hypotheses, that means that none of them has enough evidence to be proven.

So, what makes them very plausible? How does very plausible differ from plain old plausible? How do we measure plausibility?

Well thank you for demonstrating my point about how raising a child to believe that one fairy tale is true while all the others is false means that they have no concept of plausibility.

Incidentally, asking for proof is binary religious thinking. It is thinking that something is either true or false. The only thing that ever gets proved is a logic theorem because it uses a heavily constrained set of rules that are unrealistic. Nothing ever gets proved 100% in real life. There is no such thing as absolute truth.

Which means that we need to look at plausibility. How likely is it that an explanation is correct? How many questions does it satisfactorily answer compared to competing explanations? Does it rely on assumptions that we have no basis in making? Do we see the same process or phenomenon happen elsewhere for the same reasons? Can we test the hypothesis and reproduce the results?

When comparing the explanation of a god as a creator compared to the laws of thermodynamics leading to abiogenesis, the latter wins by a long shot. The former just raises more questions than it purports to answer.

Citation required.

OK:

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/inanimate

1.  not animate; lifeless

Right, so you're deliberately limited the debate here by referring to matter that is lifeless rather than matter that is not animated. Which means that you now need to define what life is. Because from what I can see you are making an assumption that life is some kind of force that inhabits matter like a soul in a body. Since we're using your definitions here, how can you tell whether a lump of matter is alive or not? What does it actually mean for matter to not be lifeless? The very word inanimate means that it is not animated, yet you are arbitrarily limiting it to mean lifeless.

What you are doing is using a vague definition of life yet demanding an exact answer as to how it developed, yet while at the same time ignoring all possible answers that do not match your vague definitions. These are questions posed in a way so you won't find answer that satisfies you.

For example:

I see you ignored my example of a car being made up of inanimate matter, yet no one would argue that a car can't be animated.

I ignored it because it's stupid. First, in this context, I'm obviously using animate/inanimate regarding life, not in the sense of motion as with the car. Second, yes, in the weaker definition the car can be built and animated - by intelligent designers. We've never seen a car arise spontaneously, and life is much more complex than a car.

It only sounds stupid to you because you have this vague (and wrong) idea of what life is and aren't open to the idea of not knowing. And then when you start to think about it, you start to make yet more assumptions that are not warranted. Why should we require a car to arise spontaneously? Why should complexity be an issue? You can't even define what life is and here you are making assumptions about it.

As I said, the very word inanimate means that it is not animated. The opposite therefore is animated matter. How does matter become animated? Through the flow of free energy. You're thinking of an engine as something that drives your car, but the word actually refers to anything that convert one form of energy into mechanical energy. Which is why we talk about rocket engines, steam engines, internal combustion engines, stirling engines, molecular engines etc.

The only characteristic of all forms of life is that it has a metabolism. Any other definition will have an exception that can be applied to something that we still consider alive.

A cell therefore is a molecular engine which uses a metabolism to convert chemical energy into mechanical energy. Thereby making inanimate matter into animated matter.

What you are doing is performing a fallacy of composition. It is energy that animates the car. The only difference between inanimate and animated matter is whether there is a flow of energy through it that can perform work. I could have instead used the example of an ice crystal growing, or snow recrystalising over time while the temperature (energy) changes but stays below freezing.

I'm talking about life, not snowflakes. If you need to define life broadly enough to include such in order to make your point, you're a perfect example of what I'm saying to emjay.

You were claiming that inanimate matter coming to life is implausible and I was giving an example of inanimate matter becoming animated. I was not defining snowflakes as being alive. But both life, snowflakes, intelligence and evolution are examples of self organisation. The same underlying thermodynamic process underlies it all. That is, self organisation happens when a system can settle into a stable state by minimising free energy in accordance with the laws of Thermodynamics. The same laws that underlie modern engines that we create ourselves. Free energy occurs when there is a thermodynamic gradient. Self organisation happens when there is just enough energy to allow for the matter to be animated, but not too much that no stable state can be reached (e.g. during the initial formation of the Earth). Free energy acts as a form of disturbance and a system falls into a stable state when the disturbance is minimised.

Abiogenesis is plausible using my definition above because we see the same underlying thermodynamic processes occur throughout our daily life. And these aren't just observations, We make use of this understanding when we create engines, or build a fire under a chimney, or try to eat well.

For this to even start becoming plausible, you would have to show that telepathy exists, that energy can persist as a complex ordered pattern without the use of matter and that there is some physical mechanism that could allow a brain to be scanned and the information transmitted back to a non-corporeal being.

So, for my view to even start becoming plausible, we have to show all that. But for you, car + snowflake = abiogenesis plausible. Complete bullshit.

I have now briefly explained above. Over to you to explain how your god is plausible.

No. At the point of the Big Bang there was only energy. Matter came afterwards. Nor would I ever say that there was ever a point in the universe's history where all matter was inanimate. Although that's not to say that we won't reach that point at the heat death of the universe.

And again you're playing word games with "inanimate."

It only looks that way because you have not defined what life is and are ignorant about physics.

[Brian37]

I wasn't writing to you; but rather, returning to the more general topic being discussed.

---

It's the journey not the destination.

It is a journey from the falsehood and being a lie, to being something real and being honest with ourselves and God and others.

How to face that what claim we are even to ourselves is a lie and to become true and cleanse ourselves from the stench and evil we have immersed ourselves despite clothing it with the images from the light claiming falsely to it.

In short, is to journey to free from valuing the illusions of Satan over that of the True Living Judge, and to incline to that spirit from God and leader from God that is ever with us calling us back...it is to be born of that spirit and light and leader as opposed to the children of Satan and copies of Satan we all strive to become and praise.

Good and evil exists, the former is God the latter is irrational darkness clothing itself with the former.

May God make us incline to him and free us from the web of lies we immerse ourselves in and free us from the web of knots blown into by sorcerers that are ever watching our footsteps, making sure to plant enough traps so we never make it out of the darkness.

Indeed the envious eye is real, the army of envious creatures is real, and the dark magic subduing the hearts preventing us from reflecting and realizing the clearest and dearest of all proofs and truths is ever there.

You call all other beliefs besides yours a lie. They call your beliefs a lie. Skeptics see most humans as lying to themselves because false comfort is more important to them than facing our finite existence.

You use the word "envy".

We'd say humans evolved to desire control over resources. All life seeks out resources, and the more control that life has over resources the more productive and successful that life will be. 

Right now in my own house, I am dealing with a cockroach problem. I really need to tear down this trailer and put a new one in it's place. I can tell you that a cockroach or it's colony doesn't give one fuck about my problems. I can tell you even when I am near them, they don't give a fuck. I constantly have to swat them aside and kill them to keep them away from my food and drink. And the REAL scientific reality is that they are far better breeders than humans and have existed far longer.

Do you think cockroaches have a God they pray to to defeat me? Or would you rightfully accept they do what they do because they evolved that way?

[Harry Nevis]

hr]

On further reflection on this... if the technical definition of a delusion is relative to cultural/group norms, what would you call, if not a delusion, a belief system that displays, when viewed independently of any of that relativity, all the hallmarks (ie 'symptoms' as it were) of a belief system that is irrationally protected, maintained, and argued?

Then the belief that life can spontaneously arise from inanimate matter is a delusion. Every day there are billions of experiments on this, and it has never once happened - even with much better building blocks as starters than were presumably available in the past.

---

Still can't quite get the handle on the difference between a belief and a scientific theory, huh?

[I_am_not_mafia]

Energy cannot be created nor destroyed.

If you're applying such laws, then you would also conclude that a universe existing as a singularity would continue to do so, unless acted on by an outside force.

Another unfounded assertion on your part here. It really is a nasty habit that you need to quit.

On what evidence do you believe that an eternally existing god is possible?

The existence of a universe with a beginning.

That is not evidence. It is just one possible explanation among others. As I said we don't know that the universe had a beginning.

Yet it still shows us that the process is likely similar even if the conditions were not exactly the same.

Cool, let's see the evidence.

The Urey-Millar experiments shows us that via the process of self organisation free energy can be used to build amino acids. We see the process of self organisation happen at every level, from the micro to the macro.

We don't try to define such mechanics because we just don't know. Similarly, you don't know how this vast universe could exist eternally in a singularity, what cuased inflation, or how life arose. Just because you speculate on such things doesn't make your speculations necessarily plausible.

You believe in the existence of something that you cannot define, have no idea how it could possibly work and which is indistinguishable from your own imagination and you are equating this with cosmic inflation and life which can be observed and studied. Why believe in something when there is no reason to believe in it?

Yet waiting for a statistically rare event has been shown to take time in practice on average. If I gave you a bucket load of 6 sided dice and you tipped them all on the ground, the probability of them coming up all 6's is a statistically rare event. If I gave you a task of doing just that, how long would you ask for to complete that task in the knowledge that you were likely to manage just that? This isn't magic, it's just a lower probability requires more time to happen on average. Now if we tasked every person on the planet to do the same thing, then we can calculate a much higher chance of success happening within the near future.

The difference is that we know the mechanics of how all 6s could come up, or how a particular lottery number comes up. We don't know the mechanics of abiogenesis.

Another argument from ignorance. We know most of the mechanics. We can even create artificial life in the lab.  We don't know yet know the specifics of what actually happened in practice.

We don't know that the universe had a beginning.

We're told it's 14 billion or so years old - that implies it had a beginning.

Evidence is that it was in a certain state 14 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. That's not the same as being told that it had a beginning.

All we know is that at some point which we call the Big Bang, all energy and space-time was condensed into one small point. We don't know what happened before that. What we do know though is that since the Big Bang, energy cannot be created nor destroyed so is essentially eternal. All All matter in the universe has come from energy, so yes, the universe does seem to be eternal.

And again, if we're applying rules like the conservation of energy and matter, then we also should conclude that an eternally existing singularity would remain a singularity. We tried to get around this with an oscillating universe, but the rate of expansion of the universe didn't fit that model.

Another argument from ignorance and yet another unfounded assertion. There was no matter just after the Big Bang, I told you this before. The fact that energy cannot be destroyed does not mean to say that that the singularity should have persisted.

[Whateverist]

In Pauls letters even Revelation and the bible (supposedly the word of god) thinks that too.. you see our problem ?

The problem is arguing over scripture with people who will accept any interpretation so long as it's wrong. But ill get back to this later.

That fits like a glove with the problem of arguing with people who will always assume it is right.  Oh well, ships signaling to pass safely in the night I suppose.

---

That is entirely the opposite of Occam's razor.

Writing as someone who has actually read Occam, his position was that people should prefer the explanation that requires the least number of causal factors needed to sufficiently account for all the relevant phenomena. At least for now, abiogenesis cannot be sufficiently explained by any known combination of physical necessity and chance over time. That does not automatically make Divine intervention the prefered hypothesis but neither can it yet be ruled out. Simply having a bias for ontological naturalism doesn't ensure a natural explanation will be found. And if I remember the point of RR's example was not to claim abiogensis was true; but rather, to provide an example of something most atheists believe is true despite any supporting evidence. And since some here are defining belief in something without evidence as delusional that would mean that, at least on this one point, those atheists are delusional. Personally, I find that a sound comparison.

"Abiogenesis' isn't a very specific claim.  It really just states that we assume it happened in the same way everything else we've ever discovered, naturally.  No instances of 'supernatural' phenomenon have ever been documented, except of course those relying on eye witness accounts.  Of that type we have many with the National Enquirer being a good source document for the curious.

We do not yet understand how every thing came to be as it is, and may never.  But until at least one non-natural phenomenon is shown to exist, I see no reason to hypothesize that any of the yet not understood phenomenon may represent the the intervention of supernatural forces.

[Catholic_Lady]

Adding to what Neo said about the bible... There are thousands of different denominations of Christianity across the world, but with the exception of small frindge groups, their differences are mostly small nuances. The fundamental Christian principles themselves are almost universally the same, despite the claim that interpretation of scripture is supposedly extremely subjective, and that the bible, in its entirety, doesn't provide an overall testimony. It very much does.

[Neo-Scholastic]

No instances of 'supernatural' phenomenon have ever been documented, except of course those relying on eye witness accounts.

That alone would not make it 'delusional' to believe in supernatural phenomena whether it's ESP, ghosts, alien abductions, NDE's or any other claim for which a skeptic does not accept as having sufficient evidence. Just because those types of phenomena cannot be easily tested in a laboratory under controlled conditions doesn't mean it is irrational to think they could be real. The larger point is that atheists putting theistic beliefs in the same category as a serious mental illness is a mild form of anti-religious bigotry.

[Brian37]

Adding to what Neo said about the bible... There are thousands of different denominations of Christianity across the world, but with the exception of small frindge groups, their differences are mostly small nuances. The fundamental Christian principles themselves are almost universally the same, despite the claim that interpretation of scripture is supposedly extremely subjective, and that the bible, in its entirety, doesn't provide an overall testimony. It very much does.

And? So this one book with several different versions, have the same core motifs? So? Sunnis and Shiites use the Koran and see things differently too. A Tibet Buddhist and Chinese Buddhist and Japanese Buddhist may have the same core motifs too, but they are just as splintered. I am quite sure Hindus also have sub sects too.

[possibletarian]

In Pauls letters even Revelation and the bible (supposedly the word of god) thinks that too.. you see our problem ?

The problem is arguing over scripture with people who will accept any interpretation so long as it's wrong. But ill get back to this later.

Well that's simple, lets have yours and why you believe your interpretation to be so.