My House Did not have a Builder (or did it?)

[Whateverist]

Well then, how do you propose believers and non-believers should carry on in light of the fact that neither of us can give the other a reason he would accept as valid to change what we believe?

I just need not to be proselytized to in order to help someone win a holy merit badge.  I don't need you to actually lose your belief in god, but I have to tell you that anyone who just believes what they think they're supposed to believe isn't someone I'd be able to carry on a conversation with for long.  My goal for believers is that they think realistically about what they know and what they hope is true.  If someone tells me they can no more prove that god does exist than that I can prove he doesn't but that they choose to believe any how, I can respect that.  You won't like it but that would make you an agnostic theist, just as I am an agnostic atheist.  You wouldn't have to actually be in any doubt that god exists -any more than I have any doubt that one might exist- but if you acknowledge that there is no reasonable way to persuade a fair listener, then you acknowledge that faith does not lie within the provence of knowledge.  Your choice to believe has more to do with who you are, what else you believe and what you need to believe than it does with any evidence.

I wonder how you feel about the idea of uncoupling faith from the concept of knowledge?  To me, I've always thought that someone who believes in the clear light of the absence of conclusive evidence shows more strength of character than the person who psyches themselves up to make the unqualified claim that God just does exist as certainly as the sky is blue, etc.

Well I didn't say that I have no reasons to believe in God. I gave a small list of cursory reasons for it. I'm just simply saying that the biggest reason for me is ore than just empirical evidence. It's spiritual evidence that makes me believe more than anything else, which is difficult to convey to someone who doesn't have a spiritual interest.

But the salient part of my question was do you have any reason which should be considered adequate justification for me -or a fair-minded impartial person- to believe as you do?  My suggestion is that neither of us has that for the other.  So in light of that impasse, how do you think believers and nonbelievers should carry on?



As for the rest:

Here are some reasons I believe other than spiritual reasons:
Logic. Now by this I'm not saying that someone by logic could not also come to a disbelief in God as well. But for me personally, it isn't logical that anything, much less an entire universe could spontaneously generate from nothing without it being caused. Nothing, as far as I know, has no generative powers, or any other powers for that matter, which I think would be necessary in order for it to be classified as nothing. So if there was nothing, that is, no material, before the universe, then to me, it is logical that something or someone immaterial had to have caused the instance of the universe. Of course this line of thinking doesn't force me to believe that it must be the God of the Bible, but it does direct me to believe that an inconceivably intelligent and powerful being must have begun the universe.

No one knows if there was ever nothing before there was something, so long as 'something' is understood to mean some state of energy or matter capable eventually of becoming what we see today, then there has probably always been something.  No one really knows the answer to such questions but inserting a god doesn't really shed any light on the questions either.  With god all you have is "strange and wonderful ways", and that explains nothing.

Math. Odds of life occurring by chance. Depending on the source, different odds are given. 1 in 4300, 1 in 10390, 1 in 10450, etc. Some scientists have said that under certain conditions, with billions of trial runs taking place, and trillions of amino acids in place, that the chances of producing a hypothetical 32 amino acid long, self-replicating peptide would be reduced to less than 1 in 1040. This sounds much better except that 32 amino acid long hypothetical peptides don't cause life, and also anything greater than 1 in 1030 is considered impossible by most scientists. (I'm sure I'll be ridiculed for this, and people will say the odds I'm presenting are way off, etc. That's fine. I didn't do the calculations myself, obviously.)

Probabilities are meaningless when your terms go undefined and you have not even one exemplar of something 'supernatural' which isn't just something natural that hasn't yet been understood.

Nature. Beyond the fact that there is life at all, but so much of it, and such a wide variety of it, all working together in a near perfect ecosystem marred only by the foolishness and selfishness of man (which I believe is the only physical creature capable of sinning, which is another reason for believing in God). All the food that exists, in such a wide variety also, and ready to be eaten easily. What was responsible for this selection process? The food itself or the living creatures who eat it? And the seemingly impossible combinations of chemicals like certain gases which provide for life. For example, oxygen and hydrogen, both of which are highly flammable by themselves, but together at a 2 to 1 ratio, they are inflammable and conducive to life. In fact, necessary for life. And of course the extreme abundance of these elements, which allows for multitudes of forms of life for an extremely long period of time. The coexistence of plants with animals and humans in that plants exude oxygen and take in carbon dioxide, and we exude carbon dioxide and take in oxygen. That's quite a fortunate happenstance.

Reminds me of the story of the puddle and the hole.  The puddle was just so grateful that such a hole could exist that would fit himself so perfectly.  Like the water puddle, life on this earth has evolved to fit.  No reason not to be grateful, there just isn't anyone to thank for making it so.

Observation. Although some scientists say that they have been able to observe some level of micro-evolution in a lab setting, I have yet to see any evidence of evolution from kind to kind, or species to species, in a lab or in nature. (If there is a case of this, I'd like to see it.) What I have observed, and assume everyone else has observed, is that everything reproduces after its own kind. This is in line with the creation account in the Bible, and not with evolution, which requires things to reproduce after another kind, even though over a long period of time, adding DNA information and passing it on to the next generation by whatever means, most commonly supposed to be by mutation, which are shown to be harmful rather than beneficial, and reduce information rather than adding it.

Evolution is as well as established as most other scientific theories, and better than many.  I'd say it is much better understood than gravity.  I think it is the beginning of life where you can best place a god without appearing uninformed.  Those of us who assume life arose naturally haven't been able to demonstrate precisely how in a laboratory.  That still puts science ahead of religion where the origins of life is concerned in that no theist has a clue how god could have created life.


Got to go now.  Maybe more later, but then all of your reasons have been presented repeatedly here and no one is ever tempted who doesn't start out assuming god to begin with.  Hence my question:  do you have any reason which should be considered adequate justification for me -or a fair-minded impartial person- to believe as you do?  I admit I have nothing persuasive to offer you, I'm just looking to see if you can concede that much.