Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Hope on January 27, 2011 at 4:51pm

I made deal with myself not to listen to Muslims or Christians and to develop my knowledge being active

in here is a kind of developing my knowledge and from time to another I take a quiz to check my atheist level..

 

A friend of mine came to me and said, atheist's do not like the idea of Hell.. I said sure they dont...

then he said, dont worry there is no hell.. Yahweh loves you.. and I said, What? are you Kidding me,, he said no,, really there is no Hell...Yahwists do not believe in Hell..

...and we Yahwists are the roots of Abrahamic religions... I just said to him your Yahweh is cute.. but Please... dont convince me I am happy with my atheism....

 

I just do not like headaches...

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Permalink Reply by Justin Snellings on January 27, 2011 at 5:15pm

I don't think I've ever heard a good argument. They all seem so ridiculous. I work with a guy that tries to convert me all the time. One of the ones he always says is "Well look at how complicated the human eye is. That couldn't have happened randomly! Someone had to have created us!" What an awful argument.

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Permalink Reply by Richmond on January 27, 2011 at 5:17pm

Justin there is a difference between a good argument to convert you personally and a good argument for religion for others overall.

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Permalink Reply by Julien on January 27, 2011 at 6:11pm

Richmond is right, there is a difference between arguments to convert you personally and arguments for religion in general. For example, some may convert to a religion because it gives them power.

 

I think it's actually a good thing to have someone like your co-worker around for experience. Of course, it would be better if religion would not exist...

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Permalink Reply by Boci Boci Tarka on January 27, 2011 at 5:50pm

You should be careful to separate arguments for a specific religion and arguments for an abstract god that somehow pre-arranged the Big Bang.

 

For the first case, almost all religions contradict Nature, disregard the finiteness of the Earth's resources, etc, and in general, are extremely stupid. So I cannot imagine a good argument - one having an empirical basis - for any specific religion, or branch of religion.

 

For the second case, the fine tuning of the phyisical parameters of the universe can make one think, but it can also be dismantled easily. 

 

Also, I find it disgusting to use abstract arguments for specific religions.

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Permalink Reply by Isaac on January 27, 2011 at 8:04pm

"IS there a good argument for religion???"

I'll answer this bluntly. No, there is not.

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Permalink Reply by Aaron A on January 27, 2011 at 9:23pm

More theists/deists on here than I thought.

 

Anyways, I have yet to receive a good argument....hmmph.

 

Also lol @ people getting sidetracked..... Please provide me with a solid argument, that's all I ask for (if it exists) :)

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Permalink Reply by Julien on January 28, 2011 at 3:16am

I think the best you can get out of this is regular arguments posted by rookies who still fall for them. It would help if people who claim they have strong reasons for believing a god exists would actually say what those reasons are. That's why I kept asking Angie Shields, because she kept saying that she has good reasons for believing that a god exists, but kept avoiding actually saying what those reasons are.

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Permalink Reply by Michael on January 28, 2011 at 12:10am

There is no argument for religion, however, the  best speculation for religion is that we are gods that came out of nowhere after the big bang by some black box (evolution, aliens,creation?), and given a billion years we most definitely will do what any god could do. So is there someone before us in the infinity of the Multiverse?

 

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Permalink Reply by Albert Bakker on January 28, 2011 at 1:33am

Post-Hume I think serious apologists have been leaving the path to provide proofs of God. Deductively you can't prove the proposition "God exists" because you can't escape circular reasoning. That is you cannot escape starting off with first principles, axioms, that already presuppose the existence of God, be it obvious or more subtle.

In dreaming up inductive confabulations you can either choose to define "God" as entirely transcendent to this world, so that He is principally unknowable to us (except through revelation of course,  which you have to validate only by proving that God exists in order to reveal to us that God exists) and not accessible with rational reasoning. But we leave the sphere of theism entirely in doing so and there is no win here either for Deists, because such a God does not interact at all with our world. If it affects our world it is empirically probable and if it is empirically probable it is accessible to rational reasoning. If you choose to shield your God this way from venomous tongues of atheist critics, you have killed Him in doing so.

So if you are a sincere apologist, then you would opt for an attempt to prove your God inductively from empirical data attained with a scientifically sound methodology by demonstrating that a theory in which the basic assumption that God exists explains it better than one who does not.

That was what was being done by the Templeton funded intercessory prayer study. Now if for example they would have found statistically significant evidence that prayer helps, this would make the existence of a God more likely. Then you could go on to investigate whether Catholic prayer helps more than Protestant praying or maybe Islamic prayer helps more than either of these two, but less than Mormon praying and so on. That would further increase the likelihood the existence of God and gives us a clue what kind of God is more likely to be true and so on. But I seriously suspect even Templeton wouldn't want to waste much dough on that route.

So these days sophisticated apologists concentrate on defending the position with ever more clever sophistry  that you can be a believer and believe that the proposition "God exists" without offering any kind of justification and still be entirely rational. Some choose to separate religion and science into two separate domains that nowhere overlap, so that truth claims derived from either of these domains cannot come into conflict, others choose for a continuum where science is at end of the spectrum and religion at the other end living on each side in perfect harmony except for a small transitory boundary somewhere in the middle where we should engage in constructive dialog to see how we can merge. And others think science and religion are opposites and necessarily in conflict.

I think there is no escaping the conclusion that the last one is true.

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Permalink Reply by Aaron A on January 28, 2011 at 11:17am

@Albert

Very well written post, I like it.

 

Since science and religion are opposites and have to be in conflict, people should just stop choosing sides. You have to pick one. And some religious people try to justify their religion with science and reasoning. This, however, does not work. So either you devote your life to science and logic or you live a completely devoted life to your religion, dismissing every single scientific fact we have discovered to this day, and go back to following ancient fictitious texts word for word.

 

This is what angers me about religious people. They just pick and choose ways to live their lives.

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Permalink Reply by Jarrod Payne on January 28, 2011 at 4:18am

I agree with Albert here. I think that science and rationality are in contradiction to religion and I cant see this ever ending.

 

I also think that there is no good argument for the existence of god or gods because the route to the answer is never scientific (or at least not a good scientific explanation) nor rational and also ends up with some variant of "It just is" or "It's just what i believe".

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