Well Sanctus, you started three rather preachy threads today almost simultaneously, trying to argue essentially the same point. I’m going to respond to all three of them here. I’ve put your words in italics, mine in a regular font, to avoid the bulkiness and tediousness of having to do the open and close quotes in square brackets thing. Besides, one essay is easier to write than three and I can't spend all day on this.
For the “Why believe in God” thread:
Why believe in God? We can feel Him calling us. Every culture throughout history has been convinced that there is a higher power that watches over them.
Utterly irrelevant. The number of people who believe something to be true has nothing to do with whether it’s actually true or not. Many people have feelings they interpret as god calling them, but that's all it provably is, an interpretation of an emotional state.
This desire to reach for that higher power is man’s search to get reconnected to God.
A heroic assumption. There are much more parsimonious explanations for that, starting with the well-known human propensity for magical thinking.
Why believe in God? The complexity of all life and of our planet. When we look to all of science, we can see that there is order and that there is a definite pattern to the layout and structure of not only the human body, but also the universe in which we live.
Ah, the old Argument from Design, the creationists’ favourite. Fred Hoyle’s tornado-in-the-junkyard analogy is an extraordinarily ignorant idea from someone with such intellectual credentials. It could have been made only by someone who knows less than nothing about natural selection. Natural selection is not a theory about chance, it is, in the relevant meaning of the word chance, precisely the opposite. Evidently you don’t understand it any better than Hoyle did.
Who created this universe in such a set a pattern that no man, when he looks carefully enough, can deny that the hand of God was used in its creation?
I can, and do. Actually, if you really look carefully, what you find is evidence of a lack of design, poorly assembled structures thrown together in a slapdash fashion from available materials. The appearance of design is completely superficial, and is exactly what you’d expect if a process like natural selection is operating.
Why believe in God? Sense of right and wrong.
Again, there are much more parsimonious explanations for human morality than that, rooted in our sociability and the need to cooperate with each other.
Why believe in God? The Bible.
It’s not a legitimate argument to cite the Bible as the source of its own authority.
Why believe in God? Jesus Christ. No other religious leader, not Buddha, Mohammed, or Confucius has ever claimed to be the Son of God.
That’s simply wrong. Lots of lunatics have claimed to be the son of god, to hear god’s voice in their heads. Ever heard of Appollonius of Tyana? More or less a contemporary of Jesus; exactly the same claims were made about him.
For the “Is there a God” thread:
Is There a God? - Creation. Unless we are able to explain satisfactorily how each of these things exist, without resorting to a supernatural force, and find empirical evidence to support our conclusion, a Creator is default.
False dichotomy. You’re implying we must invoke a Creator whenever we encounter something we don’t understand. If we’d done that, we’d still be stuck in the 16th century.
Is There a God? - Atheism
Is there a God, or isn't there a God, depends on our ability to disprove God.
Oh come on, Sanctus, you know better than that.
The burden of proof rests upon atheism to validate its position.
Nice try. Most atheists of my acquaintance would not categorically state that there is no god. Not even Richard Dawkins makes that claim. If they did, you’d be right, but they don’t and you’re wrong. They’d state that the evidence is insufficient to justify the conclusion that there is one. You’re the one making the extraordinary claim that there’s a supernatural being that has some interest in us and is endowed with logically inconsistent characteristics like omniscience and omnipotence. The burden of proof’s on you.
... the Big Bang Model of Origins.... violates two of the three Laws of Thermodynamics, and the Law of Cause and Effect. ... violates the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum.
Completely, utterly, massively, wrong. You need to go back to the textbooks.
...Big Bang is unable to explain uneven "voids" and "clumps" throughout the universe.
Not quite true, there are several possible explanations under investigation, but even if it were true, so what? So we don’t understand everything. Doesn’t mean we never will.
Plus, there remains the question, "where did the Big Bang come from?"
Again, several possible explanations are under investigation out on the fringes of string theory. There also remains the question, “Where did the Creator come from?” And if you expect me to be satisfied with something like “He was always there,” I’ll expect you to be satisfied with, “the Big Bang just happened.”
Is There a God? - The Implications ... we are not educated, we are indoctrinated.
Uh huh. And what are these three long posts of yours an example of, if not merely a different kind of indoctrination?
Unfortunately, the ultimate result is that we and our children are taught that there is no Divine Lawmaker.
And where are we taught that? Despite what you seem to be claiming here, every poll I’ve ever seen on the subject indicates that by far the majority of people everywhere in the world are believers of one sort or another. That teaching doesn’t seem to be working very well.
No one stops to consider why or how morality developed,
That’s not true. That’s a very common issue in philosophy, and even the biologists are getting into the act these days.
Evolution is unable to account for the development of the moral code inherent in all of us.
Why should it? It’s not a theory about morality, and never claimed to be.
Society suffers tremendously as a result of our children being taught we share a common heritage with rocks and plants. Individuality, meaning and purpose no longer mean anything. And we wonder why our kids act like animals today.
My kids don’t. Most kids don’t, in my experience. You must live in a pretty bleak neighbourhood to believe that. I suspect you’re guilty of the fallacy of composition here, a belief that a few representatives of a group are typical of the whole group. Besides, the fact is that we do share a common heritage with every living thing on the planet, and you’ll have to do a bit of work to demonstrate your claim that knowing that is harmful. Putting rocks in there is a bit of a stretch, I don’t think anyone’s ever claimed we’re related to rocks, but it’s perfectly obvious from genetic studies that all living things are related.
For the “Why Am I Here” thread:
Wrong answers to important questions aren't helpful.
Well, at least we agree on one thing.
Why I am here? Well, if God doesn't exist, that means that life must have come about through some natural impersonal, unintelligent, and ultimately purposeless process.
Ah, we agree on two things.
That means we're ultimately as purposeless as the very process which brought us into existence.
We’re perfectly capable of creating our own purposes. They may not have permanent cosmic relevance--few things do, except the cosmos itself--but they certainly have relevance to us. Why can't that be good enough for you?
Life's just an accident and so are you.
Highly doubtful. Current research suggests it’s an inevitable consequence of how physics and chemistry work. And no, that’s not an argument in favour of a Designer. Do some reading on complexity theory and self-organizing systems.
Life is one big accident.
There you go again, mistaking natural selection for chance.
You serve no purpose, you'll cause no lasting effect, and in the grand scheme of things your life is utterly meaningless.
In the grand scheme of things, i.e. on the cosmic scale of all time and space, that certainly appears to be true. There was a time when this planet had no life on it. There will be a time again when it’ll have no life on it, the sun isn’t going to last forever. In fact there have been at least five times in the history of the planet when it was almost reduced to lifelessness (any idea why the Creator would do that? Got it wrong and wanted to start over maybe? And no, I'm not being facetious.), and it appears to be currently undergoing a sixth great extinction event. Those events mark the boundaries of the major divisions of geological time. The end result for all species is extinction, and always has been. I don't comprehend your apparent need to define so many absolutes in life. Absolute ethics, absolute justice, absolute purpose...
Without a Creator in the beginning, there was nobody around to put you here on purpose which means you aren't here for a reason. It's that simple.
Three things we agree on...
Our worth is ultimately subjective.
You say that like it's a bad thing. What’s necessarily wrong with that?
Philosophers generally agree: without an absolute God to make the rules, there is no such thing as a moral absolute; there are only preferences. You don't actually have a right to live; you just prefer not to die. Someone else on the other hand might want to kill you regardless of how you feel about it, and who is to say that they're wrong? In the absence of absolute morality, power reigns supreme; the strong survive and the weak get exploited.
You appear to have a pretty dim view of your fellow man. In the absence of absolute morality, why can’t there be relative morality? “Who’s to say they’re wrong?” Us. Other people. The societies and cultures we’ve created. And we do say so, and we create institutions to enforce the rules. Moreover, philosophers, when dealing with matters of ethics and morality, generally try to figure things out in ways that don’t invoke anything supernatural, because that doesn’t really explain anything. It just avoids the need for an explanation. God did it, and that's that.
Why Am I Here? - The Theistic Worldview
Why am I here? Well, if God does exist, that means He is ultimate reality.
Well, subject to assorted assumptions about his nature, motives, and characteristics, all of which are absolutely unverifiable.
God makes the rules. The question is: will He enforce them?
Read a newspaper lately? Given the state of the world, he doesn’t appear to be doing much in the way of enforcement. Or is it only after we die that he enforces them?
The prevailing instinct among the majority seems to be that, yes, God will hold us accountable. It's as if most people instinctually know that one day they're going to have to explain all the bad things they've done (which of course means that they also instinctually know that there is such a thing as moral absolutes).
Is it only fear of god’s retribution that keeps you on the straight and narrow? And once again, of course, the number of people who believe something to be true has nothing to do with its actual truth content.
The point is, if God really does exist, terms like "justice," "purpose," and "morality" aren't abstract notions
Sure they are, they’re just as abstract as they ever were. Rooting them in god doesn’t make them any more concrete, it just makes them more authoritative, and authoritarian.
So begin at the beginning.
Okay. Has it never struck you how relative to culture religions are? Every culture invents one, and they go extinct when the culture disappears. The old Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, etc. pantheons are extinct by any reasonable measure, and it’s perfectly clear from the writings we have from many of those cultures that there were believers in their time just as fervent in their faiths as you are in yours. Belief in divinities appears to be something deeply rooted in human nature, not necessarily reflecting an empirical fact about the cosmos. There is no argument you can make in support of your beliefs that hasn’t been made countless times before (with minor differences in names and dates) in support of other beliefs you would probably dismiss as mythology. I know of no compelling reason to think you’re any more likely to be right than they were. You certainly haven't provided one here.
Does God exist?
Almost certainly not.
