Do you believe in God?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Patrik
  • 24,527 comments
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Do you believe in god?

  • Of course, without him nothing would exist!

    Votes: 626 30.5%

  • Maybe.

    Votes: 368 17.9%

  • No way!

    Votes: 1,059 51.6%
  • Total voters
    2,052
huskeR32
If that's the strongest part of your argument, that god's existence can't be disproved by science, then you're standing on some really weak ground there.
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I do not understand your point.
1) the thread is about believe.
2) the point was that it is only about believe, not science, so the science discussion will have no outcome.
3) I do not believe in God, so I do not see the weak ground you attribute to me. I do not think that believing adds something to my life, I have enough trouble with what I can experience.
 
Vince_Fiero
Read indeed about Immanuel Kant:
* phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience.
* Kant has a negative conclusion from Critique of Pure Reason, all we do (believe in God or our work in science), we can not prove it as truth, since it is inside of us and done with our capacities, the complete truth can not be known by us.
* Kant has a positive conclusion: there is systematic knowledge (objective) of the nature of things as they appear to us => science

So if God appeared, (1) science could objectively prove he existed. (2) That science does not prove God exists, does not prove God does not exist, it just makes it domain of believe not science.
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Ok, a few problems with this, not the least of which being that I'm familiar with Kant and I tend to reject most of his views.

Aside from that,

(1) I've argued before that I don't think this is the case. If God appeared, and demonstrated himself, he'd simply be an advanced form of life, as Carl Sagan put it, so sufficiently advanced as to appear magical. He'd cease to be "God".

(2) Once again, no one here claims to be able to prove the non-existence of God. We all grant that it's impossible to prove the non-existence of anything. So yes, we all understand that God exists in the realm of faith, not knowledge. This is one of our essential points.

Following from that, I'll re-issue a challenge for which I've never heard a satisfactory answer:

Why is faith good?
 
CraftyLandShark
Ok, a few problems with this, not the least of which being that I'm familiar with Kant and I tend to reject most of his views.

Aside from that,

(1) I've argued before that I don't think this is the case. If God appeared, and demonstrated himself, he'd simply be an advanced form of life, as Carl Sagan put it, so sufficiently advanced as to appear magical. He'd cease to be "God".
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And why would he (God) be this? Funny that a limited being like Sagan could think he can impose boundaries on the possibilities of a limitless entity (God). For a man of science, this is not a very logical reasoning. Since when does any God have to play by the rules of human understanding?


Following from that, I'll re-issue a challenge for which I've never heard a satisfactory answer:

Why is faith good?
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Because what if that's how God operates? What if the bible states the truth about God, and what if the only way to know the creator of life is through an act of faith? What if a knowledge and relationship with a living god is the highest thing that a human being can hope to attain while on Earth?

You just stated that you admit you can't prove that these things are not true, so whether the biblical explanation of the workings of faith are satisfactorily up to your subjective standards is really completely irrelevant if they are in fact true. You said you can't disprove God, so you can't write the authors of the bible off in good conscience either. You've admitted there's a possibility of God's existence and have thereby also opened up the possibility of an atheist belief being completely misguided, again thereby stating in your very own words that faith could be meaningful under the construct of something like the Biblical model of theism.
 
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Sach
You said you can't disprove God, so you can't write the authors of the bible off in good conscience either.
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See Russell's Teapot. Or the Invisible Pink Unicorn. Or ghosts. Or anything else that is non-falsifiable.
 
Joey D
I don't know what other methods we could construct, all I'm saying is using the same method that you are trying to prove as proof does not make sense. There is no room to find flaws and it will end up being one big circle. Theists fall into the same trap when it comes to trying to prove God.
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Actually, the only proof you need is that the method works, is all. But if you want to verify the method works, then you can use the method on itself. Just as Quality Control in an industrial setting is also subject to quality control to assure that it is doing its job.

Only science allows for independent verifiability. Whereas religion doesn't. In fact, ask any two people about the nature of God, and they are bound to disagree on at least a few points... even if they have the exact same religion.

Joey D
You are writing off ancient civilizations that provided modern civilizations wisdom on how many things work, there is nothing New Age about any of it. The Greeks were fantastic architects and provided us with many of the fundamentals in math. Many ancient civilizations also knew a great deal about astronomy, seasons, how the world worked, etc. To simply say that wisdom written in ancient texts is wrong, is an incorrect statement in itself.

Also Aristotle is credited with the classical model of the scientific method. Sure it is not as thorough as the modern scientific method, but he certainly laid the foundation.
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I'm not writing them off. Indeed, I have often written here that the ancients are often cleverer than we give them credit for, with their strong knowledge of mathematics and mechanics. I'm merely pointing out that we should not accept such wisdom simply because they say it is so. The near deification of ancient philosophers by thinkers in previous centuries has often held back the advance of science.

Aristotle's fault was that he thought by applying logic to observation without further experimentation and verification, he could deduce the nature of the Universe. While this was the beginning of scientific thought, it has its pitfalls. Aristotle often assumed too much based on limited information.
 
Sach
Doesn't change the fact of the situation though, really.
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Indeed not. Invoking a non-falsifiable entity lends no credence to those who do so, thus it is entirely sane to write off the authors of the Bible - at least within the context of the Bible.
 
Famine
Indeed not. Invoking a non-falsifiable entity lends no credence to those who do so, thus it is entirely sane to write off the authors of the Bible - at least within the context of the Bible.
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And entirely justifiable to consider that one might be wrong to write it off as well, just to balance out the bias.



RhAsLiCkRaE
Who cares about any of this... We WILL all die soon, will it be on your own terms or that of others
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Some would argue that it's not about dying, but about how you are living. And who actually dies on their own terms? :odd:
 
No. We've shown why that's wrong so many times it's not even worth taking my time to type out why. Here:



http://www.positiveatheism.org/faq/faith.htm

Few atheists actually claim that a god does not exist, they simply don't know and choose to live their lives as if there is no god because there is no evidence. Just like you cannot prove there is no invisible teapot orbiting the Earth, but I doubt you believe it exists. And if you don't believe it exists, do you have faith that it doesn't exist?
 
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Sach
And entirely justifiable to consider that one might be wrong to write it off as well, just to balance out the bias.
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Nope. That's the point of non-falsifiability. If it is non-falsifiable it is worthless to consider it as evidence for - or against - anything.
 
I cant believe there are 626 pages of discussion of the almighty on a car forum. this is a great site filled will all kinds of amazing minds, i'm just still confused why all these discussions take place at a place called GT PLANET?? Now by all means continue your discussion. i'll be listening
 
Indeed - it takes as much belief to believe there in God as it does to believe there is no God. It takes no belief not to believe in God, by definition.
 
MazdaPrice
I think of it that way yes.

"I want to kill myself"

*Does it*

Ended their life when they wanted to.

But that's quite off topic.
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It isn't offtopic, because after this someone will quote you again and tell you it's gods will he/she ended his/her life.
 
Dennisch
It isn't offtopic, because after this someone will quote you again and tell you it's gods will he/she ended his/her life.
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Sadly, it does seem likely. :banghead:

Offtopic, but you've got to love this "conversation".
TankAss95:

By the way thanks for your support in the God thread. Its good when someone is alongside supporting you in an argument.

nitrorocks:

Your welcome. Even though I don't get most of it due to my young age. A lot of the things they say I don't understand at times

TankAss95:

I'm exactly the same. Don't worry about it.
The best way to learn is to question everything. If you don't understand something don't pretend you do in an argument. This is what I used to do and I lost a lot of respect. Show people that you are willing to learn or find out and then you gain respect and make progress.
But honestly you are doing a pretty good job.

nitrorocks:

Thanks! You are too. There is only about 3 of us. Then the rest are Athiest.
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Please excuse my idiotic statement/thoughts (I shouldn't be in here, since I am so brutally uninformed regarding this subject, just thought their discussion was worth sharing).
 
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ad-unearthed-Turkey.html?ICO=most_read_module

From out of the blue, and from an untrustworthy source, comes news of a possibly hoaxed book which has the potential to remake the planet into one with universal Islamic religion within just a few generations.

If that were to happen, then the possibility for more peace at the expense of less liberty and individual expression would seem to be a good bet.

What do you think?

Respectfully submitted,
Steve
 
I would only ever buy the Daily Mail if I ran out of newspaper for my dog to crap on.
 
Skyline_77
Maybe.. but I would believe in God before I believed in the silly big bang theory and the like.
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Unfortunately, the near-uniform 3 degree Kelvin temperature of deep space is pretty convincing evidence for the Big Bang.
 

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