Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[Rahn127]

When thinking about time, it can sometimes be helpful to think that only the present moment exists.

You are in the same moment of time as the big bang.
Everything changes but the same moment of time remains the same. There is no infinite past. There is only the present moment.

One moment of time with an infinite number of changes.

Let that mull around in your mind a bit.

[Fake Messiah]

This is the evidence for God:



People like you think this came without any intention of a supreme designer, screw you, and people like you, and screw anyone who ever wrote anything defending atheism.

Why is it that proponents of ID always focus on animals that they find pretty and ignore stuff like Yersinia pestis or HIV?

Not to mention that posting a picture of a pretty fish is very shallow because mandarindish is known to be foul-smelling and is covered in tiny spines to inject a toxic mucus into anyone who tries to handle and/or eat it in an ocean filled with creatures that can kill you in an instant.

[The Grand Nudger]

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Incorrect.  The vast majority of people who believe in gods do so because their parents believed in gods.  

That's not true I think. Believing in God comes naturally to many people, and it doesn't have anything to do with their parents' beliefs.

As ever, the thing you think stands in contradiction to fact.  For better or for worse....and regardless of whether there is a god, and regardless of whether or  not you believe that god belief is natural...whatever that means... it will remain a fact that the strongest predictor of religiousity and even specific beliefs..is whether or not they were held by your parents.  

If you want to assert that god guides evolution in any way... you can just point out the place where god touches the genetics.  

Why? Why should I point out precisely where or how God intervened? You surely would agree that a deity can create a self sufficient world where genetics take care of things...

Why would I agree to that?  As far as I can tell, gods aren't capable of doing anything - but, again, if you'd like to point out where god touches the genetics, you're free to do so...and if you would prefer to assert that genetics "takes care of things", instead, then you can no longer point to any need for god in genetics or fish. As for you, why should you point it out? Because you're the one who asserted as much, numbskull.

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and, if you want to insist on the appearance of this or that...that's fine too..but you'll have to do without the notion that the god hypothesis is not an empirically testable claim.

Now you're absolutely mistaken about this one. God (as in traditional belief systems) has purportedly rare direct manifestations in the material world, and may do so exclusively through miracles. Miracles are rarely occuring events by definition. An empirically testable claim has to be about repeatable, even reproducible phenomena. A divine miracle is not repeatable nor reproducible.

And because of that, the god hypothesis cannot be an empirically testable claim. This is a textbook category mistake. Ah.. and a nice attempt to strawman, also.

If you say that the god hypothesis is not empirically testable, then it isn't testable by the way things appear.  Your fish argument fails, according to you.

[Silver]

Which always reasonably leads back to the famous argument, That which can be accepted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, with respect to biology, we're not really dealing with some item or object or claim lacking evidence. The trouble, at least from a theological point of view..is that the evidence powerfully aligns against the proposal. To the point that, should we wish to maintain a rational and evidenced belief in god - it simply has to be conceded that god is in no direct or intentional way a part of the causal chain of a pretty fish. Even Kloro flirts with this immediately when the claim is given the slightest scrutiny - it can be said..fairly, that he's aware of this state of affairs. This, if this world is a world with god in it, is a concurrent truth. Fish are explained by biology, not gods. In our world, assuming it's that world with a god in it, biology also has the creative power claimed for a god in a direct equivalence.

Apologetics dooms itself when, to accept the conclusion, you must deny a reality that could otherwise accommodate a god. That's how a person ends up insisting that the god hypothesis is both empirically verifiable - with reference to a fish, but also empirically untestable. Why a person is then compelled to argue against the plainly and manifestly apparent fact that a persons religion is determined in the main by the circumstances of their birth. How god both nudges life...and is completely hands off. Tying a god belief to these absurdities is pointless, and, for people who give a shit about these things...heretical.

Insisting that the world, as god is contended to have made it..must somehow be wrong, so that a cultists errant beliefs can be right.

[Nay_Sayer]

Schizophrenia, pathological delusions and psychotic experiences are not make believe, and neither is religion, nor religious beliefs - those things exist, sure as eggs is eggs.

Not all religious experiences display symptoms of mental illness. Besides, any experience corresponds to a mental state -including the experience that you would accept to be some form of communication with the divine. 

If you don't accept by default any possible experience as evidence of the divine, ar at least some claim of prophethood, then you are begging the question.

 No evidence for any God's existence, my dear. No evidence, nor rational.

This is the evidence for God:



People like you think this came without any intention of a supreme designer, screw you, and people like you, and screw anyone who ever wrote anything defending atheism.

Ah yes. That was the time during the creation FSM invented LSD. Xhe made some wild stuff, Like the platypus.

[Silver]

When the god concept adequately transitions from imagination to empirical evidence, then we can accept a reality where religious faith becomes obsolete.

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't know. The notion of a religion of nature has been consistently explored, and even sees some bottom up resurgence of late. It's likely that people will always find use of a way to make axiomatic claims about the world as they see it, about what is right and wrong, what can't be done, should be done, must be done. If, as Kloro alluded to in his own way, religiosity is, itself, natural to humans - then even without a belief in gods..or anything supernatural at all - there will still be about as many religious people as there ever where or are.

Or, to put it another way - if we understand the claimed attributes of god as having been informed by the world as we see it - then it's always been the case that some natural or empirical claim lies at the root of our misapprehensions about goblins and fairies and whatnot.

[Silver]

In a field of ifs that never bloom into reality can and always will be viewed as aestheticly ingenious.

[Rahn127]

People who see a god in nature are also mystified when a yellow liquid is mixed with a blue liquid.

They don't understand where the green comes from.
God must have done it.