Atheism is unreasonable

[The Grand Nudger]

The emergence of life and the emergence of consciousness are two distinct problems for your position, buddy.

LOL..I can't wait to hear what the "problem" is with either.

[Bad Wolf]

I love how you people pretend as if you don't believe that someday (maybe even tomorrow) science will explain how life originated from nonliving material. Then it will be "at first I didn't believe in God, but now, I REALLY don't believe in God".

Please stop telling us what we do and don't believe, as far as I know, psychics aren't real which means you aren't one.

Again, to NOT believe in God means that you believe that nature is the ultimate originator of life. No gray areas. No in-betweens.

Yes actually it's a very grey area. Just because I don't believe god created the universe, it doesn't neccessarily mean I believe it came from nature either, it just means I don't believe your particular god claim.

Let me put it this way:
I have a jar of sweets
The amount of sweets in the jar can only be even or odd
I tell you that they are odd
Do you believe me?
No?
Then does that mean you believe the amount of sweets in the jar is even?

I really didn't need to "try".

Ohhh I really think you do. Talking snakes, rib women and magic trees. There's less magic in harry potter.

Law of excluded middle.

What kind of law is that? When did they pass it?

The emergence of life and the emergence of consciousness are two distinct problems for your position, buddy. You can either treat them separately and get attacked from two different angels...or you can loop them in together and get double the attack. Pick your poison.

I don't think you actually answered his question there.

The Bible is clear that God made everything that was made. I believe God created from "nothing".

So something can't come from nothing except your god. Are you familiar with the special pleading fallacy?

Because in my opinion, the God hypothesis is more reasonable than its opponent.

That's not an answer to his question.

[His_Majesty]

Cool, what a fine proof that an all knowing being doesn't exist.

Really?

Surely you know better than to threaten an atheist with god. It's like little boy warning his father about the monster under the bed.

It can't be a threat if you don't believe it to be true. You wouldn't be threatened if I held an imaginary gun to your head, would you?

Prove god exists and he created life. Lack of evidence proves nothing one way or the other. But as a method of making predictions about the real world science has a great track record and alas does not.

Science has also been in error, so I don't know what to believe lol. I've given arguments for the existence of God...and those were only 6 among the two dozen or so theistic arguments (Alvin Plantiga).

Citation for the scientists believing in a static unchanging world and for sheppards believing the world began 5000 years before their time.

Well, the static bit is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_universe

The sheppards bit is the HOLY BIBLE..which in the first 10 words of the entire book is "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth". (Gen 1:1).

Potentially yes, sometime in the future. Your point?

Well, you believe science will explain things to you in the future. I believe that Jesus will return in the future, and explain things to me.

I guess we both have future hopes lol

That's backwards honey. You just said if something is logically impossible it can't exist. That was no baring on whether something imagined does exist. Imagining a thing does not make it exist.

It depends on what it is. God's existence, if he exist, would be necessary. It would be what is called a "necessary truth", and all possible necessary truths must be actually true.

And if we can imagine such a beings existence...if such a beings existence is possibly true, then it is actually true.

You are presuming that "smarts" are required to make life. That's a leap.

It is, based on the complexity of DNA, which takes more than random chance to get.

You want to discuss the Model Ontological Argument fine. Start a thread. There are various permutations of it, and I want to see yours before I refute it.

Good idea, once the heat dies down from this thread.

[His_Majesty]

Yes, it all has to do with denying god. Nothing at all to do with the factual reality that the big bang does not represent the universe "beginning to exist."

Please tell me one cosmologist that doesn't believe that our universe, the one that we live in, began to exist at some point in the finite past. I will wait.

It does? "Everything that begins to exist has a cause," adequately explains why infinity is impossible? Why is it that you think just saying there is evidence is sufficient for me to accept what you say as true? Every time I make an argument, you essentially just say "I have a counter argument," and then stop talking. What the hell?

Well, you were the one that made it seem as if you were so familiar with the argument when you briefly "rebutted" my 6 arguments. I thought you were at least somewhat familiar with the arguments against infinity so I would be spared of having to get full in depth with it.

But anyway, the arguments against infinity is more geared towards the second premise of the argument, which is "The universe began to exist". It is basically saying that if God doesn't exist and there was no "first cause", then the beginning of our universe was just one event on a past eternal time scale. But this can't be true, if it was true, then infinity would be traversed. But infinity can't be traversed.

Analogy: Your birth was an event in time. If there was an infinite number of births which PRECEDED yours, the event of your birth would never come to pass, because for ever birth in the past, an event number of births would have preceded it, so your birth would never come to pass.

The same thing with the universe, the universe would be a product of an infinite regression of "causes", and no effect from these causes could come to pass for the same reason your birth would never come to pass.

A timeless cause is needed...a timeless cause that wasn't a product of preceded "cause"...a cause that doesn't depend on anything external for it to exist. "God" is the only being that is capable of this.

And Im sorry, there is no cosmologist or no mathematician that can help you with this infinity problem.

Yeah, you're just asserting that time ceases to exist at some point in the past, which is interesting because the actual educated physicists and cosmologists don't do the same. Maybe you should try getting published, win that Nobel Prize, if you know something they don't.

Tell you what...I want you do consult any physicist that can help you with the infinity problem. The infinity problem is independent of any bogus scientific experiment or any latest bogus theory or development in science.

Logically possible is not the same thing as physically possible, you know. It is logically possible that Abraham Lincoln was a cat, if I were willing to do what you do, and feed absolutely no facts into logic.

Makes no sense. Logically possible that there was a cat named Abe Lincoln, or logically possible that a man named Abe Lincoln was a cat?

Incidentally, there are logically incoherent portions of your god claim too, like creation ex nihilo or omniscience. The former has no evidence to justify it

When God created the universe, time was also created. If the universe wasn't created from nothing, that would mean that it had to exist infinitely. But I already gave reasons why it couldn't have existed infinitely. So creation ex nihilo is justified, otherwise explain to me how you can any event in time come to pass if time is infinite??

, and the latter is impossible to truthfully attain, as the mere claim of omniscience doesn't rule out the possibility of knowledge beyond the scope of that being's understanding, unknown unknowns.

Omniscience is the attribute of knowing all true propositions. Newsflash; if you know all true propositions, then there is no knowledge "beyond the scope of your understanding".

Evolution plus objective physical reality, if you must know. But this is a red herring to distract from the faulty nature of the argument from morality, here. I take it you can't answer my contentions with that argument?

Please. Before getting in depth, I was trying to set a foundation regarding the mere origins of morality, just like I try to focus on with regards to consciousness and life..the origins of these things. Before we get to which view is the correct view (or seemingly correct), lets start with where do we get them from in the first place.

Red herring? Please.

You need to be a biologist to speak on biology in a way that would be binding to everyone else. As it is, Bill Gates isn't a relevant source, making your use of him an argument from authority. In this area he is just some random guy, you might as well have just said that some guy you know named Richard said DNA was like a program, for all the good it does.

Bill Gates made a quote about the complexity of a particular "thing" called DNA. Any geneticists or biologists can tell you complex DNA is. This is a known fact. Nothing new.

But since that is your criterion, Michael Behe is a biochemist who has written books which discuss the complexity of DNA and cellular structures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Behe

So how do you detect and quantify it, such that you can demonstrate its objective, real presence within DNA? That was a part of what I was asking too. The important part, actually.

READ

http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/basics/dna

What the fuck are you talking about?

Figure it the fuck out.

... Evolution, as I explained earlier.

Evolution? Please explain the origin of consciousness via evolution.

But this is entirely irrelevant to your claim that DNA contains information, and my contention regarding the nature of information too, so I suspect you're merely bringing it up as a smokescreen to cover for the fact that you can't demonstrate that information exists as anything other than a conceptual label applied by minds.

Bringing it up as a smokescreen? DNA contains specified information, that is a fact, and the last I checked, information has informants. You said that the argument from design begged the question, and I pointed out the fact that DNA is one thing that is apparently designed due to the specified complexity of the information that is in it.

Any biologist/biochemists will confirm this, whether they are believers or not. So if you are not DENYING the fact that DNA contains information, then you don't have a argument, and your objections are irrelevant and meaningless.

Not all codes have programmers, because not all codes are intentionally inputted into a series of objects. If I run a random letter generator you'll find some words in there eventually, but that doesn't mean that those words were purposely placed there.

Foolishness. If the words weren't placed there purposely, it isn't a freakin code!!!

In the case of DNA, we aren't talking about a code really, we're talking about four sets of chemicals reacting in predictable ways.

That it can be "read" as a code speaks only to the fact that we understand how these chemicals interact, and what they do once that interaction is complete. It's no more reading a code than predicting where a thrown ball is going to land is reading a code.

No it isn't acting in predictable ways. Consider this video by Stephen Meyer, where he is explaining the complexity of DNA...and he is explaining it to school children, which would make it easier for you to follow.

Me and him draw a theistic conclusion because of this..that is our implication...your implications may be different, but the science is the science...and no one can deny that. Show me a video which shows that DNA is not as complex as we make it to be, or the probability of getting one protein molecule is not as high as Dr. Meyer makes it to me. Can you? Probably not.

So just deal with it, and stop making these miniscule objections.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kuc6t-Jvxs4

Also not what I was saying. The bible is the claim, not evidence for that claim. And the books of the bible were written anonymously, so you have no way of knowing whether they are true accounts or not, as you have no way of establishing whether the authors have good information.

No one living today knows who wrote anything in antiquity. It isn't as if we are so sure of who wrote anything else in history, but when it comes to the Bible, all of a sudden it is time to be a skeptic.

Your entire knowledge of ancient history is based on what you've been told from someone else. You weren't there. We use the same criterion to establish historical truths regarding biblical claims that we use for anything else in history.

You keep saying that like it means anything. The consensus of christian scholars both religious and secular is that the bible was written anonymously, and the names attached to the individual books were merely traditional names.

So just because the individual books were "traditionally" attached to the alleged people, that mean that it isn't true? Of course you are gonna say "thats not what I meant", well, if it isn't what you meant, then why the hell are you saying it?

You are right, the Gospels were written anonymously, but both Jews and Christians had a tradition of carefully passing down creeds, oracles, parables, scriptures, etc to future generations.

And the majority of Paul's writings precede the Gospels, which makes his epistles an even early source as a testament to the Resurrection.

If you crack open an NIV you'll even see that admission printed in the foreword. You're talking out of your ass here.

The "foreword" stuff in the NIV is irrelevant if I am on here admitting that the Gospels are anonymous. Again, I said we have historical evidence, which comes from the Early second century apostles who stated whom the Gospels were written by. Historical evidence = shit that was written down and or passed along to people that were a lot close to the scene than people typing in message forums 2,000 years later.

Oh, and by the way? Arguments won't establish the existence of god, because you can't argue something into existence. Evidence is what you need, and evidence is what you're summarily failing to provide.

Arguments give good reasons why we believe what we believe.

[pocaracas]

Damn, I couldn't read the whole thing... so many goodies y'all must have already addressed...

Unreasonably high expectations.

Dammit!

Care to tell us a bit about what has made you believe that?

By the grace of God, I was raised with a Christian foundation. As I got older, I started to get into apologetics, which is nice, because not only do I have faith, but I have good REASONS to believe what I believe.

And here I am today.

Isn't it convenient that the god you were raised to believe in turns out to be the true god and he digs on healing?... oops, I got carried away with the lyrics of that song!

---

---

Care to share those "reasons"?
All you've shown is "indoctrination".... I know that is a powerful force which convinces you of the existence of an unfalsifiable thing, and is the one major force that convinces people around the world to believe in the existence of the god most believed in any particular region.

J. said that?
How do you know that?

Easy. You have two explanations...Either God did it / Nature did it.

If you don't believe that God did it, then you believe that nature did it. If someone tells me "I don't believe the light is on", then by default, they believe that the light is off.

It is quite simple, if you ask me.

I asked how do you know that some person said a particular sentence?
I even gave you the example of another person saying a particular phrase. Did that person say that phrase?.... Did that person exist at all?
Or... what the alternative?
Think about it!

Aren't you mixing the order of it?

Well, based on the fact that I don't believe it happened either way, I guess the order doesn't really matter.

It does matter.
The lack of order shows how disorderly your reasoning about this is.
Think about it!

"dead matter" becomes dead after being alive.... prior to life, there's no death.

You are telling me what happens after life begins...I am talking about what made life begin in the first place.

Were you there?
Joke's over!
You have no way of knowing for sure how that happened... neither do I.
Thus far, nothing in my life... nothing in the growing body of evidence in all sciences... shows any hint of divine intervention.
Why, then, should I assume a god had anything to do with any part of the development of chemistry, biochemistry, biology, psychology, etc... ?

Also, sex comes wayyyy before thinking and talking.
Think about it!

I thought about it..I also thought about question of how is it that the male's reproductive system just happens to be compatible with the female's reproductive system. Either both sexual organs had to evolve simultaneously (or around the same time), or one before the other (years in between).

Simultaneously would suggest intelligent design. Years in between would be impossible.

LOL!
You missed this news a few days ago:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/...ms-fossils

Also, Traumatic insemination

also known as hypodermic insemination, is the mating practice in some species of invertebrates in which the male pierces the female's abdomen with his penis and injects his sperm through the wound into her abdominal cavity

You'd do good to learn a few things before you spew your faulty reasoning based on limited information.

Because it doesn't postulate the existence of an entity which far surpasses everything that exists.... an entity which never shows its face.

According to Christian theology, Jesus is God...and people seen Jesus...therefore, people seen God.

Have people seen god? Really?
How come many were unconvinced that the man was a god? So much so that they even killed him... according to the story.

Now, how can we be sure that the story portrays real events, instead of idealized ones?

A series of chemical reaction led to biochemistry, which led to single-celled organisms. In time (lots and lots of time), some of those organisms, possibly due to proximity, managed to survive, breed, feed better when working together, thus giving rise to multi-cellular organisms.
Add in more time... much more time... more time than you can imagine... and these organisms present differentiation of structures within them, eventually, giving rise to complex organisms, with organs, skeletons, etc...
In spite of several mass extinctions, life endured on this planet... we got trilobites, dinosaurs, birds, mammals, simians... us.

Here the god of "time" is brought forth. "Oh, it takes soooo long to occur..given enough time, anything can happen". I agree, it does take a long time. So long that it never happens.

Like MRSA never happens...
Our grasp of what a million years is is very tenuous... I certainly can't think about it. It's a monstrous amount of time. It's not a god... it's just time enough to adapt to the environment or die.

Far before "us", there was consciousness. Several experiences with animals, show awareness of the self and of others... mostly in apes.
Then hominids got out of trees, developed the use of hands, developed the brains and here we are.

I am talking about consciousness, PERIOD.

Then define consciousness, PERIOD.

An unconscious person has no consciousness... Words don't always convey the meaning you think they do.

That, in a very very very tiny nutshell, is what science claims about how us, thinking apes, came to be on this rock.

I worship God, not science.

I worship nothing.
I understand some science and it makes sense.
I see no god, except in literature or as wishful thinking...
Which sounds more reasonable?

Are you seriously wanting to tell me that this is far less reasonable than the existence of an entity which doesn't show itself, doesn't manifest itself, doesn't appear to exist beyond people's wishful thinking?

Doesn't show or manifest itself? Well, I've never see life from nonlife, and consciousness from unconsciousness...so that alleged "natural" phenomenon never manifests itself either.

You may want to read on:
http://www.theharbinger.org/articles/rel_sci/fox.html

My own contact with this question was to present for the first time a scientific theory of origins to the Pope and the papal scientists as derived from repeatable experiments. These occurred in 1984, 1985, and 1990, when I was a guest of three groups in Rome, the trips being supported by Academia Lincei, IBM, and the National Foundation for Cancer Research.

Why was Pope John Paul II interested in what I might say? I can think of three main answers. The first is that, like anyone else, he is curious about where he came from, or to put the question in its most ancient time frame, what did he come from? Secondly, the Pope recognizes that, with forward extrapolation, synthesis of primitive life in the lab is a natural equivalent of Genesis in the Bible; as Pope he must therefore prepare for new arguments. The third explanation is one I received in Rome from many scientists of several faiths who surround and advise Pope John Paul II. This answer, related to the second one, is that Pope John Paul II wants not to repeat the mistake of the predecessor church who had excommunicated Galileo.
[...]
In the first of my three lectures for the papal group, we considered self-organization of matter into living beings. This process had been predicted by the French Catholic scientist, Louis Pasteur, in an 1864 debate in the Sorbonne on what was then called spontaneous generation, Pasteur asked: "Can matter organize itself? In other words are there beings that can come into the world without parents, without ancestors? That is the question to be resolved."

The right kind of matter to organize itself is known now as thermal protein, protein made from amino acids on Earth by heat. This was first suggested from the work of Alfonso Herrera of Mexico City in his laboratory of Plasmogeny, where he showed in 1924 to 1942 how to make amino acids and sulfobes, a kind of cell, under terrestrial conditions. This synthesis has much more geological plausibility than that of the amino acids of Harold Urey and Stanley Miller, which are produced in assumed atmospheres in closed flasks, and which are much better known due to publicity. The thermal amino acids also fit into a single thermal continuity. The second step toward a cell after amino acids is the formation of protein. This is where we came in, in a context of protein, not thinking at that time of this as a stage of life's origin. As a young professor of protein chemistry, I wanted to know if it were possible that amino acids such as had been produced by Herrera, and later by Miller, could yield proteins on the primitive Earth even before there were living cells to make protein. So we tried heating amino acids, even though heat was known to decompose amino acids.

We learned that we could avoid the decomposition if we included in the mixture to be heated a sufficient proportion of one or both of two amino acids: aspartic acid and/or glutamic acid. The results of indiscriminate heating is seen as a dark tarry mass in Figure 3. When only a small proportion of these two amino acids in included we get an amber-colored product. For years we thought the amber component contaminated the kinf of white product that professional polymer chemists obtain, such as in styrofoam. In 1979, Dr. Klaus Dose and associates of Mainz, Germany, showed that the amber color was due to flavin, formed by heating amino acids together. We then remembered that flavins are significant in energy metabolism of all cells; indeed riboflavin is standard in the human diet and even in supplements in the drugstore. The experiments indicate that flavin was there from the beginning.

The main product of heating the amino acids is protein, so listed under protein, subheading thermal, by Chemical Abstracts since 1972. The nomenclature came into existence a year after a special report on existence of characteristics common to protein and to thermal proteins was published in Chemical and Engineering News.

The expectation of protein chemists, which we shared, is that thermal protein, then called proteinoid, would be randomly disordered. What the experiments and analyses showed is almost the opposite.
[...]
In each case the amino acids determine their own arrangements. No outside agent such as RNA or DNA makes any difference during a heating process, as the late Cyril Ponnamperuma showed in 1990. The possibilities with DNA and RNA were the scheduled subject of my second paper for the papal scientists on the visit to Rome in 1985. The papal scientists had arranged this as a debate with a collegial friend from California, who at that time postulated nucleic acids as arising first. He gave his talk in the morning, and left at noon to visit someone elsewhere in Italy. As a result, the scheduled debate did not follow my lecture in the afternoon. There was no debate then, as there is none now.

When brought into contact with water, all tested thermal polymers of amino acids, without exception, have been found to organize themselves into cells, as described in the 1984 meeting.

Think about it!

[dyresand]

Lets take away all of the fluff and feathers for a minute. Let's take away all of the technical babble, all of the rhetoric for just a second.

I can't speak for every religion, but I am a Christian theist. Now what does that imply? Well, that would mean that I believe Jesus Christ died on the cross for the sins of mankind, and that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.

That is basically my belief in a nut shell. Now, if you are an atheist, you may find my beliefs laughable, sickening, stupid, etc....which is fine, Christianity isn't for everyone because after all, Jesus said "But the gateway to life is very narrow and the road is difficult, and only a few ever find it." (Matt 7:14).

But as an atheist, here is what you have to believe...you have to believe that billions of years ago before humanity, dead matter was floating around in space...and for whatever reason, suddenly, this dead matter "came to life". Not only did it come to life, but it came to life and began thinking, talking, and having sex.

Just think about that for a second. This non-living material suddenly CAME TO LIFE. For the life of me, I just can't get myself to believe that, even if I tried. I just don't understand how naturalism/atheism is a more reasonable position than theism.

You have to believe that a process that can't think or see, created consciousness. So consciousness came from a process that can't think??

I just don't have enough faith to be an atheist.

you can't call atheism unreasonable. there is many reasons why people don't don\'t believe in god. there is many reasons why atheists do not believe in a god and you know why it starts with the bible and it starts with church. they give you only the good parts and never the terrible parts of the bible. the bible is filled with contradictions and also plagiarizes off of other cultures dogmas. jesus is a copy of horus, horus being the sun god and well he was a deity of early man that would allow people into heaven but he is not forgiving if you do anything terrible, unlike jesus he forgives everything and people take advantage off it and it causes a lot of issues here in the real world were people think they can get into heaven if they kill someone god would forgive them. reality check there is really no historical evidence for jesus, there could have been a crazy preacher that had and almost identical name and he could have died via crucifixion and that type of death is nothing special and jesus didn't didn't die on a cross either if was a plank of wood or something resembling a Y with a piece of wood sticking up through the Y for is head do rest on. That's a huge Is because history and Christianity do not mix very well. Considering Christians wan't the whole thing about jesus being added to teh bible but have no credible evidence for his existence. If he did Romans would have kept a record but there is no such thing.

[Thackerie]

Type II civilization can easily reach any star in the galaxy.

Type II civilization. Heehee. That made my day.



Great thread.

In order to have a Type II civilization, one must live on a Class M planet. Or something like that. (All these sci-fi motifs tend to be confusing.)

[Mudhammam]

......

[TreeSapNest]

But as an atheist, here is what you have to believe...you have to believe that billions of years ago before humanity, dead matter was floating around in space...and for whatever reason, suddenly, this dead matter "came to life". Not only did it come to life, but it came to life and began thinking, talking, and having sex.

Which only requires chemistry.

You have to believe that a process that can't think or see, created consciousness. So consciousness came from a process that can't think??

Yup, chemistry.

I just don't have enough faith to be an atheist.

No worries.

[Thackerie]

... By the grace of God, I was raised with a Christian foundation. As I got older, I started to get into apologetics, which is nice, because not only do I have faith, but I have good REASONS to believe what I believe.

And here I am today.

Poor guy. Indoctrinated from the beginning. Never taught to think critically.

I realize that most atheists here, like me, were former christers, and many, like his imperial self, were indoctrinated and subjected to apologetics. I'm glad we had the wherewithall to break free.