(October 7, 2015 at 6:16 am)robvalue Wrote: It's important to know that atheism isn't about claiming to have all the answers. The sceptical atheist will answer "I don't know" to any number of extremely important questions such as "where did the universe come from". It's simply a (lack of) belief based on the evidence to hand, in what I consider to be an incoherent concept. It's not a statement that further evidence can't arise which could change this.Just because a person may not know or understand something it doesn't mean that no one else doesn't know and understand. If you had the most intelligent person from 2,000 years ago in the modern world today he could go bonkers over the most simple things that we take for granted and don't even think about. And if the process continues it could be that way in the future. But we have one major advantage over ancient people. We can imagine all kinds of things that they were simply incapable of thinking about. So, for instance, if we went into the future and interstellar space travel was a reality it wouldn't come as a shock to use because we have already been exposed to the possibility by our imagination.
To make this point: something shows up claiming to be "God". How do you distinguish it from an arbitrarily powerful alien, which is not a god? Many people say they would "just know". Well, the alien has the technology to give you that exact feeling.
What the fuck is a god? If it's simply something that "creates realities" then our brains are gods. They create our own realities that we live in, which may or may not be based on a separate objective reality.
Ancient people and even some modern ones don't understand how stuff came to be. It came to be through a process of evolution, which is ongoing. The difficulty is in understanding what Nothing is and what its properties are. But we do know for a fact that once sufficient amounts of celestial hydrogen is created and clumps together in giant balls it goes nuclear and cooks up new elements. And the process of cosmic evolution continues. Planets are formed. Even more complex elements are created. The process continues. Life begins. But everything is really composed of "dead atoms" of various "dead elements" that all originated from the evolution of hydrogen in stellar furnaces.
If there is a "god" maybe it's hydrogen and gravity. They make everything possible.
