(June 25, 2015 at 9:59 pm)Louis Chérubin Wrote: Hi everyone!
I'm not sure whether this is the right place to post this, but I'd really appreciate some answers to some/all of the following questions. I'm interested in how an average atheist thinks about these topics. It would be great if you could give some explanation for your answers. I'm coming from a protestant worldview.
1. Does God exist?
2. Where did the universe come from?
3. Does my life have a purpose?
4. Why do people suffer?
5. Is there life after death?
6. Can I distinguish right from wrong?
7. Can people know truth?
Sorry for being point form.
Hello
1. Probably not.
2. The Big Bang, but if the question is why there is something rather than nothing my answer is I don't know, don't think we as a species will ever know, and to be honest, don't really care; I don't need to have an answer to every question, and I think there are many questions we will never be able to answer with certainty.
3. Your life does not have a purpose but it is still amazing how it came to be - all that had to come before for you or me to be here today... millions of years of evolution preceded by our planet and solar system forming and everything all the way back to the Big Bang.
4. There is suffering in the world because you can't please everyone; every battle has a winner and a loser and every time something is given to one person there is another who cannot have it.
5. Probably not.
6. My view is that some of morality is conditioned and some of it is innate, and the part that is innate is geared towards not harming our own species. For instance the Nazi's achieved their evil by dehumanising the Jews, likening them to rats and lice. The converse of that is that we treat animals better when we ascribe to them human feelings and motivations. It makes perfect sense to me because there are other biological rather than mental effects that achieve the same results: for instance I saw a programme about Cannibal tribes who got a strange disease that caused them to shake whenever they ate human flesh; nature's way of saying 'don't eat your own kind'.
7. I'm sorry, I don't understand the question. What is truth in this context?
