Is there a GOD?

Kez180 said:

....
There is only one thing I cannot forgive religion for, that is giving people the perception that there is something else after life, thus discouraging the human race as a whole from attempting to live forever....

Click to expand...

Alluding to blowuppers?


Got a weird comment to your footnote too:

Kieran
Yes I sold my car and bought BBP @ 50c with the proceeds....

This car would be vintage car by now, worth a lot of money as well, but buying power would be? Well, just halve it every 7 years and it will be close.

Kez180 said:

I believe that when you die, that is it, that is all, you are over...

There is only one thing I cannot forgive religion for, that is giving people the perception that there is something else after life, thus discouraging the human race as a whole from attempting to live forever....

Click to expand...

Thankfully, there are scientists who are not so pessimistic and based on the prima facie evidence from clinical studies to date of the NDE phenomenon that consciousness might survive body death, the AWARE study is now underway.

yes, i saw a video on this a couple of years ago.

in surgery, some patients rendered brain-dead for some specialised operation, have been able to report that such-and-such occured during this brain-dead period.

eg., doctor X said "ABC" to doctor Y, or "i saw XYZ happening"

indicating separation of consciousness and body

MS+Tradesim said:

Thankfully, there are scientists who are not so pessimistic and based on the prima facie evidence from clinical studies to date of the NDE phenomenon that consciousness might survive body death, the AWARE study is now underway.

Click to expand...

Kez180 said:

I believe that when you die, that is it, that is all, you are over...

Click to expand...

Of course when a living organism stops living that is all. Consciousness is unique to the organism and dies along with it. Once evidence of consciousness ceases it cannot be observed again.

However, people have been "brought back to life" but they were not actually dead in the true definition of death.

Current ability to resuscitate people who have "died" has produced some remarkable stories. Drowning in cold water (under 50 °F/10 °C) so effectively slows metabolism that some persons have been revived after a half hour under water.

Click to expand...

1. no pupil reaction to light
2. no response of the eyes to caloric (warm or cold) stimulation
3. no jaw reflex (the jaw will react like the knee if hit with a reflex hammer)
4. no gag reflex (touching the back of the throat induces vomiting)
5. no response to pain
6. no breathing
7. a body temperature above 86 °F (30 °C), which eliminates the possibility of resuscitation following cold-water drowning
8. no other cause for the above, such as a head injury
9. no drugs present in the body that could cause apparent death
10. all of the above for 12 hours
11. all of the above for six hours and a flat-line electroencephalogram (brain wave study)
12. no blood circulating to the brain, as demonstrated by angiography

Click to expand...

MS+Tradesim said:

Thankfully, there are scientists who are not so pessimistic and based on the prima facie evidence from clinical studies to date of the NDE phenomenon that consciousness might survive body death, the AWARE study is now underway.

Click to expand...

Yep, well said

J..You can knock on a deaf man's door as long as you like but he still won't hear you.

Unless he sees you he won't know you're there but it doesn't change the fact you're there.

MS+Tradesim said:

The relevance of this is that the most common objection to belief in any kind of God (not just the Christian one), is that there may be no way to scientifically prove that a God exists.

Click to expand...

Which I don't think is necessarily true. Like you go on to suggest, and as I suggested, there may be "proof" that neither I or science can understand. However, as I also said, I can only go by the information at hand, and since God doesn't speak to me I conclude that religion is likely an artificial belief, as the evidence and concept of religion strongly favours this.

The only thing the religious people have going for them in a debate of whether or not their god exists, is that they can "feel" him. Many would conclude that it is a state manufactured by themselves, but who knows, maybe many people can actually feel god. This still isn't enough for religion to be so specific though, as the sense of a higher power does not prove "God" exists.

If a single god does exist, it's likely he's just God, and not just of Chrisitans or Muslims, which is another argument to why the religious aren't rational. What makes them all think that their god is the only and only true god? I know people who are spiritual and officially part of a religion, but they don't take it literally. They may believe in something more, but not that a certain god or certain religion is the only correct answer. I would consider these people rational from my perspective, because they're aware of the unknown.

we all rationally believe many things that science is not equipped to rule on.

Click to expand...

Such as? Also consider the difference between high probability, and stating it as fact. This occurs in all groups, as scientists take what they think are high probabilities and state them as fact, and many religious people leave no possibility that they may be worishipping a non-existent entity. I may be wrong about everything. I don't think so, but I allow for that possibility. I think it's a good thing to do.

There is a question that I have pondered......
Is the universe teeming with life, or does life only exist on planet Earth?
I also wonder if we knew the answer to that question would it have any impact on whether we believe there is a god, or not?

Mr J said:

The only thing the religious people have going for them in a debate of whether or not their god exists, is that they can "feel" him.

Click to expand...

There are quite a few sophisticated philosophical arguments for God, several of them with empirical support and people find them more or less persuasive. For myself, it was a cumulative case. There was no slam dunk feeling or thought or argument that sealed it for me. But putting that aside, if people feel they have experienced a transcendant consciousness, then that feeling counts as evidence for them, giving warrant to their belief that a God exists. If a person like yourself, has not had any experiences to warrant belief in a God, that only counts as lack of warrant for you to believe - it does not reduce the rationality of believers.

To your second line of response, I provided some examples of rational beliefs that science cannot prove: (1) other minds exist, (2) you are experiencing reality as it is ie. you are not just a brain in a vat being fed sensory input a la "The Matrix".

And I would reiterate a point that I circled earlier: is it rational to believe "I only believe what science can prove" when that belief itself cannot be proved by science? Interestingly, this very belief forms part of a loose argument (?) for atheism in an article posted by AgentM in the new thread. Despite the errors in that article, it seems to be approvingly highlighted as reasonable thought. That kind of thinking is about as convincing to an informed theist as asserting the earth is 6000 years old would be to an informed atheist.

As an aside, atheists need some new heroes. I'd recommend William Rowe, Michael Ruse and Quentin Smith.

Buddy said:

There is a question that I have pondered......
Is the universe teeming with life, or does life only exist on planet Earth?
I also wonder if we knew the answer to that question would it have any impact on whether we believe there is a god, or not?

Click to expand...

Good one Buddy, the question of `is there a god` should be `why is there life`?

Some good feedback in here : )

There are plenty of signs out there, you just got to be 'open' to see them and hear them.

If you refuse to look and listen, you arent going to believe..

Donga said:

And having a great laugh over this thread, "just a slob like one of us"...

Click to expand...

lol good song : )

If God had a face
what would it look like and would
you want to see
if seeing meant that you would have to believe
in things like Heaven an in
Jesus and in saints an all the prophets

Yeah,Yeah,God is great
Yeah,Yeah God is good

Not bad,

"why god never got a phd:

1. He had only one major publication.
2. It was written in Aramaic, not in English.
3. It has no references.
4. It wasn't even published in a refereed journal.
5. There are serious doubts he wrote it himself.
6. It may be true that he created the world, but what has he done since
then?
7. His cooperative efforts have been quite limited.
8. The Scientific community has had a hard time replicating his results.
9. He unlawfully performed not only Animal, but *Human* testing.
10. When one experiment went awry, he tried to cover it by drowning his
subjects.
11. When subjects didn't behave as predicted, he deleted them from
the sample.
12. He rarely came to class, just told his students to read the book.
13. Some say he had his son to teach the class.
14. He expelled his first two students for learning.
15. Although there were only 10 requirements, most of his students
failed his tests.
16. His office hours were infrequent and usually held on a mountain top. "

I have a question for the philosophers. Is the concept of god a proven fact? If not why do we believe that which is not proven?

We know the sun is the source of heat for life on the planet. It is a fact.
Do we believe the moon is the source of heat for the Earth?

It's Snake Pliskin said:

I have a question for the philosophers. Is the concept of god a proven fact? If not why do we believe that which is not proven?

We know the sun is the source of heat for life on the planet. It is a fact.
Do we believe the moon is the source of heat for the Earth?

Click to expand...

Okay, grab your drink of choice and put on your best "doubting Thomas" face.

I am of the unshakable belief that the way we conceptualise a God is so exceedingly and prohibitively limited that our efforts to define something "unknowable" are probably feeble at best.

I seriously do not think we, on this little rock, inquistive as we are, can account for a universal movement of energy through billions of years, through billions of galaxys, so unknowable and unfathomable it itself begs belief.

I do not believe the construct of time can be applied to something that is infinite - it is a human defined term that helps us make linear sense of the past and future as a relative term. However, it does not help us with the degrees of inifinity or how to account for universes outside our own universe.

For example, can we say that the consrtuct of time existed before the universe existed, or does the construct of time apply to matter within a black hole. That is, without that which is relative it becomes a very handy, but a very one dimensional construct.

The vast interconnectedness of energies though billions and trillions of galaxies may have something to do with a construct we dont understand and externalise as GOD. For instance, the infiniteness of the universe may actually be the fabrication of all that was, is and ever shall be. Infinite is infinite. If the inifinite actually already contains the ALL, then we have a serious problem with our relativity construct. That is, what we thought occurred yesterday, is actually something that is already contained in our infinite universe. So how could something have occurred in the past if it is already encapsulated in the infinite.

There is a possibility that we're remembering/experiencing at a layered, very complex level of revelation that stems from some universal movement.
If we move to death, even at a physical level, the universe is infinite - you have always been dead, and you have always been alive. You are just experiencing a layer of a construct that is possibly akin to God trying to recreate God, or God trying to love God. THat is, if the universe is infinite, it has within it, all that has and will happen. So, if you die, you are dead relative to a time as we define it, but it is impossible to be dead in the infinite universe. You must still be alive somewhere? The universe has always been. It is impossible to accept the notion of infinity without believing this construct. If we are still alive then (whilst also being dead), then in what sense in what capacity are we alive? If we start to question the unknowable, only then do we start to see that that which we call God is everything that is was and will be, and absolutely every moment of life is a layer of revelation of everything being everything.

More to the point then, the being of absolutely everything was, is and will always be for time immemorial. For example, the light of a dying star reached us at a certain point in "time". But the universe as inifinite means that there is no end point to that light. It is merely a revelation for us at that moment. What once was, is perhaps still being.

Im telling you, our notions are limited in the extreme. We even perceive the spiritual as somehow enveloping Earth or being very Earthly even though we are a nanoscopic piece of dust in the near cosmos. It flies in the face of logic, that we finally cannot hope to measure something that is immeasurable - that is, our own time within the inifinite. Might we finally understand that we never were and will always be, we might finally perceive that something greater than us also never existed and has forever existed.

$20shoes said:

I do not believe the construct of time can be applied to something that is infinite - it is a human defined term that helps us make linear sense of the past and future as a relative term. However, it does not help us with the degrees of inifinity or how to account for universes outside our own universe.

Click to expand...

Shoes, greetings. If we were not here, our known surroundings would still be evolving and it`s only because we have (what is called) intelligence that this evolution is recorded for knowledge sake.

I have contemplated what level of intelligence this race can attain and there is no limit. What was impossible 1000 years ago is now very real. It`s disappointing no live planets are within our present view.

Let me expand a little, because I'm confusing myself, and its quite a leap to understand this...

My supposition of course purports that not only is space, as a measure of distance, expanding infinitely but that time is likely infinite on a separate plane (that is, there is only "time" as a relative construct to help us separate our experiences linearly). But there is no end point to time. At a certain point of being, all things and time were then in being. The universe contained everything at the point of its being - time, matter, energy. Everything required to have a universe was there. Of course, if you accept this, then by a strict definition there is not necessarily a past and future. There is possibly only that which we're creating, from something that is already in being. Why would something be creating or using something that is already in being? Why would the universe keep creating itself within itself, and with that which is already in being? - perhaps to be relative to that which it is??

The most compelling argument for God, possibly stems from the origin of Universe. This is counter to my theory above , and for this you accept that time is unfolding linearly, that there are things that are yet to be, and that things that were are no longer.
Before the Big Bang, there was nothing - no space, or time or light or matter, excepting for one hugely dense hot ball of "something". That something contained all matter and time would start ticking form the moment this matter was unfurled. But before this unfurling this hot dense pea sized ball of matter/energy/time must have been surrounded by something (though, not space - there was no space). The nothing surrounding this something must, logically speaking, be so infinitely infinite in its nothingness that it could be quite capable of surrounding and absorbing the pea sized density as it unfurls and proceeds to infinitely expand. That is, there must be "something" into which we expand and there must be a finite border at the edge of the universe, which once crossed places us into "nothingness". So, if we flew our spaceship faster than the speed of light we would eventually move back in time ( wait, I though time was linear) and eventually come to a border crossing as an illegal alien, which once crossed places us outside of time and space.

By any definition, the concept of God as "all encompasing" and transcending space and time gels with this very concept that beyond the inifinite boudary of our universe there must still be something even more vastly inifinite that we're expanding into. Could the mystery of God be that very "inifinite" which is beyond our own infinite?

$20shoes - whatever pills you are taking, I want some :

gav said:

$20shoes - whatever pills you are taking, I want some :

Click to expand...

Gav, my head hurts!!
Oh, and yes, you need to take the blue pills. lol

God is only what we don't understand yet.

Once there is logic, reason, and proof, it stops being assigned to God.

God is the mystery, the unknown, what to be afraid of. And has been used as a tool to control people through that fear.

And, no need for an Atheist hero, we have religion leading the cause.