Where did the universe come from? Atheistic origin science has no answer.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Well it's not an organised religion certainly but it depends how you want to define a religion. Not all religions are based around God you know. Does this seem like a religious text to you?

http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.1.i.html

The guy who wrote that would be defined as an atheist by today's standards but he saw it as a religion.

I see it as a poem.

If you want to oppose something don't you need something of your own to oppose it with in the first place? For example to oppose Communism you must have a political belief that is not Communism.

Exactly.
The opposite of Communism is not Communism (it isn't Capitalism)
The opposite of guilty is not guilty (it isn't 'innocent')
The opposite of theism is not theism i.e. atheism (it isn't another religion)

With respect they are false dichotomies. One can have the position that a person is not guilty by simply not agreeing that they are, not necessarily saying that they are not guilty.

[Sword of Christ]

I was born an atheist.

You weren't born an atheist you just had other other things to get on with at the time like learning to walk, talk and shit properly and you had to get this out the way before tackling the deeper issues. Once you were at a more informed state of development you made your choice.

You've never responded to this statement with anything coherent, rather, equating being born with no belief or concept in any deity to being born unable to be toilet trained (subjective, technically shitting yourself is still being toilet trained, just not to our subjective standard).

Like I said you deal with the basics first then your place in the greater scheme of things and your relationship to God later. Or you decide God God doesn't exist and is some kind of a myth still have an active choice to make.

So, in effect, you're wrong. Everytime you post, you post from a demonstrably incorrect premise, which means most of what you type based on that premise is...well...probably wrong.

If you want to challenge atheism you really have to go straight in for the assertions and assumptions atheists like to make such as "I was born an atheist" or "lack of belief" or "default position". These may as well be doctrines and dogmas that shore up your faith in the belief that you are right and theists are wrong/deluded.

[DLJ]

...
With respect they are false dichotomies. One can have the position that a person is not guilty by simply not agreeing that they are, not necessarily saying that they are not guilty.

Yeah, well, ok.

The choices therefore are:
Yes
No
Maybe

---

...
You weren't born an atheist
...

I don't know how to break this to you gently but ... erm ... well ...
You too were born an atheist.

Sorry. Bad news, I know.

I have some numbers of good counselors if you need one.

[Norfolk And Chance]

If you want to challenge atheism you really have to go straight in for the assertions and assumptions atheists like to make such as "I was born an atheist" or "lack of belief" or "default position". These may as well be doctrines and dogmas that shore up your faith in the belief that you are right and theists are wrong/deluded.

Nobody is born an atheist.

To be an atheist, you need to know and understand god claims and then not believe them.

Babies know fuck all.

[DLJ]

...
Nobody is born an atheist.

To be an atheist, you need to know and understand god claims and then not believe them.

Babies know fuck all.

Babies lack a belief in gods.

Problem?

[Esquilax]

We're not an accident alright? The universe clearly built up toward greater level of precisely arranged complexity over time and we're the most complex objects in the known universe sitting right here this was built around a system of physical laws that had to be 100% perfectly arranged without error.

It's unbelievable that you still don't get this, but just because you say something is so, doesn't mean that it is, and you don't get to say this is obvious because it demonstrably isn't by the fact that nobody here is agreeing with you.

You're not just saying you don't know whether God exists or not you're saying you don't give a fuck about him if he does, you may as well just not give a fuck about anything then.

What was that I keep saying about telling me what I think?

Oh yes. Not to do it. Stop it.

No not my god, your God, our God, the God with a capital G. God is the context he is the creator and the reason for existence, everything the whole lot.

I would appreciate it if you didn't presume to assign ownership over me to someone else. That'd be real nice, if you'd stop being so incredibly arrogant. Thanks in advance!

Without him there is no reason because he is the reason.

That's begging the question in a most amazingly ignorant way: if god doesn't exist then he was never the reason and his absence wouldn't suck reason out of things... because he would never have been there to supply it in the first place.

Try and keep up, okay? You're not talking to another christian, here: you're trying to convince someone who doesn't believe what you do. You can't automatically expect that I would agree.

If God doesn't exist then there is no such as morality or good and evil we just made it up and everyone's opinion is as valid as anyone else.

I literally explained this to you in the morality thread earlier. We live in a physical world, where we each experience a mostly uniform version of it through our senses; there are some absolutes in morality based on those.

If God doesn't exist how are we meant to have freewill?

Ultimately, we may not. We might just be chemical interactions in our meat brains: it doesn't change the fact that my experience is still new to me.

We would be the product of physically explainable processes and we can explain and predict all these processes as they are mechanistically determined.

We can do that.

If we are created in the image of God then we share in the freewill he has seeing as he is a being beyond the natural order who purposefully created the natural order. We are the product of Gods creation.

We probably don't have free will in the way you're describing it.

There wasn't a time before God created time. God may well have created other universes but they will have their own time streams. God exists beyond time but is relational to it. A bit of William Lane Craig on this subject.

Prove it. Don't just presume it, the way that buffoon Craig does.

Complexity built up over time, not just in the biological world of course but applies to the structure of the universe in general and it's natural formation over time. You're claiming that was accidental but I'm going to have to disagree, this was intentional, not micromanged but intentional.

So, I accuse you of cherry picking the pieces of evolution that suit your purposes and ignoring those that don't, and you respond by... doing exactly that, only completely, openly dishonestly because you've been called on it.

Evolution does not only most toward complexity. I gave you examples of this, and you're completely ignored it in favor of lying to me again.

The Holy Spirit tells you or something, I don't know why does matter what parts are literally true? What matters is whether God exists and whether the Bible is the spiritual tool you can use to commune with this very same God. It's a Holy book that's what it's for.

So basically you pick and choose what's convenient for you, and yet you expect that this will be some kind of argument for your position?

It is the real world, at least to some degree in some sense we're not going to nitpick over details. It's the reality of God and our relationship to him as laid out in there that matters.

Prove it.

It makes sense because it is true and if it wasn't true it wouldn't make much sense but it does makes sense so it is! ARGH!

Unless you're absolutely wrong in your assessment that it makes sense. Consider that: you don't know everything, you could be in possession of incomplete knowledge that leads you to the wrong conclusion.

I'm going to ask you to do something completely crazy, now: actually consider the possibility that you might be wrong.

[Doubting Thomas]

We're not an accident alright?

Why, because you say so?

The universe clearly built up toward greater level of precisely arranged complexity over time and we're the most complex objects in the known universe sitting right here this was built around a system of physical laws that had to be 100% perfectly arranged without error.

If everything that is complex has to have been created, then what complex being created God? You have to admit, a being which is all-knowing, all-powerful, and exists outside of space and time has to be pretty complex.

As far as physical laws go, don't you realize that they are just tools discovered by scientists in order to explain the natural universe? If they were given to us by God, then why weren't they listed in the bible? Why did it take scientists to determine that voltage = resistance X current instead of just reading it in the bible? Oh right, because God didn't happen to tell the superstitious bronze age authors about electricity. To them, electricity was God getting angry during thunderstorms. Probably because someone picked up sticks on the Sabbath.

[Esquilax]

It is in opposition to theism/Christianity/other religions and it would replace them with something that isn't theism/Christianity/religion if everyone were to adhere to the ideology.

Ah see, that's where you're wrong. If everyone was an atheist like I am, and christianity turned out to be true, than everyone would be a christian. This isn't such a hard concept to grasp, dude: I follow the evidence where it leads. If everyone were like me, we'd follow the evidence, and then the moment it pointed to your god being real, we'd believe in him.

The only reason you'd need to feel that my position is in opposition to yours, is if you knew that there isn't any evidence for your position, and never could be.

So I have the right idea if we're being fair and not beating around the bush about it. If God doesn't exist or there isn't a good reason to believe in him then from that point of view atheism would be what everyone ought to ideally (de)convert to. If God does exist then you may want to avoid it, at best you're just going to be horribly wrong.

Pascal's wager has been done to death on this forum, Sword. Go and take a look back at how thoroughly it has failed your kind.

[Norfolk And Chance]

...
Nobody is born an atheist.

To be an atheist, you need to know and understand god claims and then not believe them.

Babies know fuck all.

Babies lack a belief in gods.

Problem?

No problem, but babies have no concept of belief or non-belief. To not believe something you have to be aware of belief.

[Angrboda]

Quite right.

The opposition to religion being... not a religion.

Well it's not an organised religion certainly but it depends how you want to define a religion. Not all religions are based around God you know. Does this seem like a religious text to you?

http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.1.i.html

The guy who wrote that would be defined as an atheist by today's standards but he saw it as a religion.

Well, at least you're consistent. Consistently wrong that is. Your understanding of Epicureanism is as wrong-headed as your understanding of atheism. First off, that is a book about Epicureanism, and it's unclear whether the author, Lucretius, was himself an Epicurean. Second, it's not clear that Epicureans considered themselves to be followers of a religion; if you have evidence that they did, I'd like to see it. I don't believe they considered themselves any more followers of a 'religion' than the Stoics, Cynics, Sophists, Pythagoreans, Platonists, or any other of the other common philosophical schools of ancient Greece thought of their beliefs as a religion. Even if they did, what they did follow, the philosophy of Epicureanism, was not atheism, and is not necessarily implied by atheism. Moreover, that some atheists are religious does not imply that atheism or all atheists are religious; you've been told far too many times already that atheism isn't a specific set of 'beliefs'. There are plenty of atheists in the world who are religious — Buddhists, Taoists, Jains, Raelians. The fact that some atheists are religious does not in any sense support your claim that atheism is a religion. This is simply invalid logic. But even if you could demonstrate that atheism and religious behavior are correlated, you still wouldn't have demonstrated that atheism is the source of that religious behavior, as correlation does not imply causation. Perhaps one of the most developed frameworks for identifying a religion is Ninian Smart's dimensions of religion. Statler Waldorf debated whether atheism qualified under Smart's framework, and granted, I'm biased in the matter, but I don't think he was successful; you may weigh in on the matter if you like (thread: ).

Epicureanism is a system of philosophy based upon the teachings of Epicurus, founded around 307 BC. Epicurus was an atomic materialist, following in the steps of Democritus. His materialism led him to a general attack on superstition and divine intervention. Following Aristippus — about whom very little is known — Epicurus believed that what he called "pleasure" is the greatest good, but the way to attain such pleasure is to live modestly and to gain knowledge of the workings of the world and the limits of one's desires. This led one to attain a state of tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from fear, as well as absence of bodily pain (aponia). The combination of these two states is supposed to constitute happiness in its highest form. Although Epicureanism is a form of hedonism, insofar as it declares pleasure to be the sole intrinsic good, its conception of absence of pain as the greatest pleasure and its advocacy of a simple life make it different from "hedonism" as it is commonly understood.
. . . . .
Some writings by Epicurus have survived. Some scholars consider the epic poem On the Nature of Things by Lucretius to present in one unified work the core arguments and theories of Epicureanism.