There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.
There's no "of course" about it. Noone can know for sure, but you can look at the evidence, or lack of evidence, and decide for yourself what you think is more probable.
There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.
There's no "of course" about it. Noone can know for sure, but you can look at the evidence, or lack of evidence, and decide for yourself what you think is more probable.
I think the most plausible answer is that I am God and I know everything.
Nope - I'm Sparticus 
OMFG! Am I reading this right? LOL Did a hot looking Jehova's Witness chick bang on your door too?
I dunno I'd like to think there is a God person running around. It keeps what's left of my morality in check. But a problem I'm having with it is the same as I get from an athiest point of view. I mean I don't believe that we came from sea sludge to space age as basically dumb luck and I find it just as hard to believe that some God created us -apparently just for the Hell of it.
In Genesis, it says God created us in his own image. Just what did they mean by that when they wrote it down? I really doubt they meant to imply that God looks like us. So I'm guessing maybe they meant that we are beings capable of abstract thought created by a being capable of abstract thought?
That would make more sense to me. The debates on free will and other stuff seem to point out that our thought processes, when boiled down are really nothing more than chemical reactions. this hormone releasing this - those endorphins causing that... LOL Free will is the result of fuzzy logic....
Anyways, these "chemical reactions" don't have to be confined to some sort of "shell" (meaning a body) do they? could these processes still develop if held in some other sort of suspension?
Man I hope that made sense. I'd like to get into more detail about what I'm trying to propose, but due to a limited intelligence and a really nasty cold I have, I can't.
Providing that you can ignor what religeous leaders tell, just go and look for the information on this, there is now so much evidence that anyone with a modecome of intelligence can see the lie and stupidity of religeon - why do you think that they tell you it is sinfull simply to look for yourself, this must surely indicate that they have something to hide and are afraid of it.
No athiest is afraid of reading any book, the Bible and the Koran are not off limits to the atheist, as say for example - the God delusion would be to any religeon.
To help a little with the sea sludge comment - ask how it is possible to survive and live well on sunbeams?
Answer:
plants convert simple light into physical material that we can eat and thrive on - does that not sound equally impossible?
That's because evolution isn't just "dumb luck". It's dumb luck plus selection of the best.
Consider this experiment: You are given 1000 dice, and the task of throwing 1000 sixes. Take as many throws as you need. That would mean you'll go on throwing dice until the end of your days... Unless you can lay the sixes that you get aside, and continue with the other dice. Then it's a piece of cake, ready within an hour. That's the difference between randomness with and without selection.
Not exactly. Photosynthesis (and there are some animals that do it, too, btw) uses light energy to convert carbon dioxide and water, into glucose (a simple sugar). So, photosynthesis starts with physical material and ends with physical material; it's just the configuration of the physical material, that changes.
What is significant about photosynthesis, is that it represents an ability to use light as the energy source for the chemical reaction; we (and other chemosynthesizers) get our energy to do chemical reactions, from other physical materials (usually, breaking the carbon-to-carbon bonds in glucose, to release the energy that the plants used to form the bonds, and that originally came as sunlight).
I suppose that the energy that holds a chemical compound together, can be regarded as a component of the chemical compound - in which case, you're right, in a way (also, E=MC^2 suggests that glucose may be "heavier" than the the equivalent amounts of carbon dioxide and water parts from which it was constructed, due to the added energy, although I don't know if this is so). I just thought that I should add some clarification.
It is pretty amazing to think that (almost) all the energy that drives life, started as sunlight (there are organisms at the bottom of the food chain, in the deep ocean, that use hydrogen sulfide, coming out of deep-sea vents, as their original life-energy source). It is also pretty amazing to think that all the various materials that constitute life (and everything else) almost entirely started as clouds of hydrogen, that collected into stars and was then fused into larger elements, then got scattered into space as the star exploded, eventually to form new stars and planets (with the larger elements included in them).
I think that you're overgeneralizing about "religion." Certainly, there are "religious" persons who are afraid to to consider ideas that may threaten those that they already have (this applies to some scientists, also, and I would expect that it may apply to particular atheists). However, there are many persons who are devoutly religious and also very curious about many things; and historically, religious scholars have often been at the forefront of naturalist and other philosophical considerations. The Age of Reason, and the Scientific Method, came out of a Christian culture, and these were not at all exclusively the product of atheists. Many great scientists of history, proceeded with their investigations, due to their "religious" belief in a rational and intelligible Creator God that designed nature according to rational and intelligible Laws of Nature that could be found and described.
You're reading it right if you're reading it in English
What's your point?I won't get into that extremely simplistic version of evolution (dumb luck, in the form of random, undirected mutation is barely even half the story) as others have answered that more than adequately.
That sentence about your morality worries me though. Am I to take it that if you didn't believe god was looking over your shoulder you'd fall into a disgusting pit of immoral behaviour and do whatever you please with no thought of the consequences or the effects on other people? What would that say about you or the way you were raised? I'd much rather give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you'd be as good as you currently are if god suddenly slipped from your mind. A moral atheist is that way because he believes it's the right thing to be. Simple as that. The concept of the Golden Rule - "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" - doesn't, in my opinion, need any religious weight behind it for it to be valid.
Taking anything from Genesis as even remotely true is, to me, one of the largest mistakes a person can make. The Earth was made in six days? Well, no, it quite clearly wasn't (there are centuries of evidence, then centuries of Popes attempting to squash scientific discoveries and the people who made them). If a supposedly divinely-inspired (or dictated) and infallible book made such a massive error about where we came from, I have trouble seeing how anyone can trust it to tell us where we're meant to be going
Doubts about the bible's implications, guessing, maybes, hunches about god's thought patterns ... I don't mean to pick holes gratuitously, but if that's as definite as the bible allows you to get, it doesn't seem all that infallible to me.
Chemical reactions have to take place somewhere. Biological chemical reactions - especially the kind that make our lives possible - can't happen in a vacuum. Without the infrastructure of the body (circulatory/digestive/reproductive/immune/neural/skeletal/muscular etc) regulating the separation, interaction and precise timing of our biochemical activity we simply couldn't exist. Of course, if consciousness itself is something other than the patterns of billions of neurons firing away when we're awake (and our reactions to them) and could be ascribed to something non-physical, there'd be something in that. However, noone's been able to keep a person consciously alive without a working, physical brain just yet. Theoretically it might be possible, but right now it's science fiction.
Now, go and rest. Trust your immune system and help it out with a little ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) and the odd cup of tea (stimulant, diuretic, plenty of antioxidants) - those little chemical reactions could save your life...actually, they do, every minute of every day
... and you're not a Jehova now Hank, even after a hot busty redhead banged on your door.
Shocking... I'm shocked.
Shocking... I'm shocked.
What's the source of this fable about a hot ginger JoHo trying to convert me in my front room? I was there, it didn't happen like that.
She was a brunette from Amway. Wanna be a rung on my ladder to success?
She was a brunette from Amway. Wanna be a rung on my ladder to success?
Maybe dustin was there too
Oh sorry, I faded off and filled in the blanks with fantasys. Sorry guys, I did it again.
You sure you're not a Bronze-Age desert scribe?
God designed us amazingly, didn't he?
btw I read the god delusion despite the fact that I'm christian. It raises good points and forces us to ask questions about how god designed us to evolve and interact with our world (photosynthesis) but it was so sarcastically condescending that it lost its credit as a well researched persuasive book in my mind. To me, a lot of chapters just sounded like, "believe what I believe and drop your mumbo jumbo religion you dumb ignorant ****er" which didn't really make me feel good.
Depends on who you believe and why you believe them. That question just raises more questions: do you think you have a choice in this belief; was it impressed on you as a child; have you examined it in light of the facts of the world; have you considered what it would take to change your belief, etc? Other questions arise to do with the many, many flaws in the apparent design of humans and other species (a lot of which make it appear as if we're all still in alpha-testing phase, rather than ready to compile and ship as finished products) but they can wait.
Sounds like you read a different "God Delusion" than most people. I never took Dawkins to be that combative (no more combative than the average creationist - usually less so - and at least Dawkins has verifiable fact on his side), but he's certainly nothing if not forthright & honest and not one to mince words. Perhaps you should read TGD again, approach it objectively, dispassionately and actually consider what it has to say, rather than take personal offence - but taking offence is likely to happen if you've already decided you're right and everything in the book contradicts you
Perhaps read Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" or "The Blind Watchmaker". They're both awesome resources for learning about evolution and come without any of his now-famous atheist arguments.Better still, read someone else. Dawkins isn't the only atheist to write a book about religion and *gasp* some atheists actually disagree with him on many points. Dan Dennett's "Unweaving The Rainbow" or "Breaking The Spell" would probably be a little less confronting and he approaches the topic from different directions to Dawkins (but with no less a convincing argument). Michael Shermer & Victor Stenger are good places to start too. But if you really want to be offended, read Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens' books on atheism. They'll make Dawkins seem like a fluffy little bunny with candy in his pocket.
prove it
It's up to the person making the claim to provide the evidence, not the other way around.
For example: you say you have a dinosaur in your garage. Fine. I say "show me the dinosaur." If you can't or, for some reason, won't show me the dinosaur, I can only assume, based on the evidence, that you don't actually have a dinosaur. There's no reason to believe that what you're saying is true. Showing me a book you say the dinosaur told you to write doesn't count as evidence either.
In court, it's up to the accuser to prove his case, to prove the guilt of the accused person. All the defence has to do is cast doubt on the evidence for the crime.
In science, it's up to the scientist to prove his theory with research and experiment and verifiable & falsifiable results. He can't simply say "this fossil is between 50-75 million years old" or "this gene controls eye colour", he has to show his results. Not just that - he must show how he found those results, so that others can follow the same steps in the same way and either verify or disprove his experiment.
So, if someone says to me "there is a god" and I don't believe them, it's not my job to prove them wrong. If they make a positive assertion that "X exists", they have to convince me of the existence of X. Why should I be required to prove the non-existence of something I've seen no evidence for to begin with? Not believing things is the default position for humanity, it's why we require proof for everything, whether it's someone claiming their car is the fastest, their dog is smartest, that they love us or if someone is accusing us of murder.
Well, I do have my PhD in Ancient languages, although it's confusing, the year on my certificate says 10 BC... WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
Ideally, people are happy just to settle for their own beliefs without insisting that others follow their beliefs.
Whether or not there is/are god/s, squids, small furry creatures from Alpha Centuri or not is something for everyone to rationalise for themselves.
That's the main thing that really annoys me about many religions, their insistence that other must agree with them.
Unfortunately Christianity has a really bad rep for this sort of thing.
By the way Hank, how does the Squid feel about calamari?, I'd just hate to go to squid hell over it.
Whether or not there is/are god/s, squids, small furry creatures from Alpha Centuri or not is something for everyone to rationalise for themselves.
That's the main thing that really annoys me about many religions, their insistence that other must agree with them.
Unfortunately Christianity has a really bad rep for this sort of thing.
By the way Hank, how does the Squid feel about calamari?, I'd just hate to go to squid hell over it.
It means you got it years ago, the correct description now is BCE and CE.
I vaguely recall that from school, but I choose to ignore it, because I can, and I don't feel like wasting an extra character.
Islam? Muslims?... if they abandond that religion is the same as death. In Turkey i think, some muslims wanted to kill a guy who converted into christianity because he abandoned the religion.
Oh, and who cant forget the cartoons from Denmark iirc... if that's not insistance... what is.
This is why I find religion to be stupid, and I'll make my own decisions on life and everything based on my own views and experiences, rather than some random books of fiction written a trillion years ago.
I agree with you, most religions have this problem and I'm getting at all of them.
My thoughts were mainly based on the large number of crusades, inquisitions, etc that christianity seems to have pushed for the last 1600 years.
Something [does god exist]
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