Question for those who don't believe in a higher power.

[beowulf 1]

'private revelation' is meaningless. That is why I ignored it. The person who 'god' reveals himself to can in no way prove that he wasn't halucinating or just misinterpreting what he saw or heard.

[Muenkel 0]

So, what you're saying is it cannot happen and that you know this for sure and can prove it. Am I right?

If you wish, you can read my reply to JackC just above your post.

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Chris

[beowulf 1]

I never said anything about proving anything.

There is no evidence of any deity so there is no reason for me to believe in one.

[Squeak 17]

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>Why soon or not at all?

We still have the resources, technology and will to get off-planet. I don't think all three of those will always be true.

we wont have the ability any where in the near future.
the sizes of the vessels required to be able to trans-locate a significant portion of the earths population to another habitable plant prohibits us from building anything here on Earth, the energy requirements to get it off the ground are too great.
any interstellar transports will need to be built in space, and they will need to sustain life for multiple generations as we do not have any habitable planets in our solar system or with in several life times from here.

So no it can not happen in the near future, we are still centuries away from being able to to do that based on current technologies.

You are not now, nor will you ever be, good enough to not die in this sport (Sparky)
My Life ROCKS!
How's yours doing?

[billvon 2,475]

>the sizes of the vessels required to be able to trans-locate a
>significant portion of the earths population to another habitable plant
>prohibits us from building anything here on Earth, the energy requirements
>to get it off the ground are too great.

You don't need to transport "a significant fraction of the earth's population." For the purposes of getting our DNA out into the universe, a few will suffice.

>as we do not have any habitable planets in our solar system . . .

So make em habitable.

[jcd11235 0]

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Granted, in this type of circumstance, the person would have no way of proving the experience to another unless God intends it to be shared.

Exactly. Yet, how many people have we all heard claim that the only way the god is through Christ? If God "intended" such a message to be shared, it would be readily provable.

Math tutoring available. Only $6! per hour! First lesson: Factorials!

[Squeak 17]

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>the sizes of the vessels required to be able to trans-locate a
>significant portion of the earths population to another habitable plant
>prohibits us from building anything here on Earth, the energy requirements
>to get it off the ground are too great.

You don't need to transport "a significant fraction of the earth's population." For the purposes of getting our DNA out into the universe, a few will suffice.

>as we do not have any habitable planets in our solar system . . .

So make em habitable.

you really dont put any consideration into your posts do you,

You are not now, nor will you ever be, good enough to not die in this sport (Sparky)
My Life ROCKS!
How's yours doing?

[Muenkel 0]

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Granted, in this type of circumstance, the person would have no way of proving the experience to another unless God intends it to be shared.

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Exactly. Yet, how many people have we all heard claim that the only way the god is through Christ? If God "intended" such a message to be shared, it would be readily provable.

You have a valid point. I do believe in God through faith. I cannot scientifically prove His existence to anyone, but I have reasons why I do believe in His existence. Those who say the only way to God is through Christ, I believe are stating that because of their faith. That's usually a Protestant statement. I'm Catholic and it is not the Catholic teaching that the only way to God is through Christ. We believe that anyone, including people who may have never heard of Christ can make it to heaven. It all comes down to how we each live our lives and our culpability in God's eyes on our judgment day.

_________________________________________
Chris

[Nigel 0]

I have no trouble attributing emergence of 'intellect' and 'creativity' to the customary evolutionary process.

I think you could say human 'creativity' is a manifestation of attributes (eg solving food problems) that favored survival and reproduction.

[StreetScooby 5]

Let me say up front, that I accept there is something I refer to as God. I do not see it as a noun. I see it as a verb. It's a great river we are all part of. Everything is part of it. Having spent many years of my life trying to reconcile my view of God with the 1st Law Of Thermo, that's the only view that now makes sense to me.

Stay in your inner tube. Watch out for the big rocks. Keep the cooler close by, as needed.

We are all engines of karma

[grimmie 177]

Where does the Devil fit into all of the "Higher Power" conversations?????

[birdlike 0]

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I still don't get why people are hung up on the idea that the universe has a beginning or ending as far as creation goes.

You don't find compelling cause to just wonder how "all that is" ever came to be? I sure do! The question is the most fascinating one in existence!

I just don't have any confidence that anyone alive has the correct answer, and I don't have any confidence that anyone will really get that answer--particularly not in my lifetime, if ever.

That's one of the things I've had to come to accept. It's rather like enjoying a delicious pint of ice cream that you find in your freezer inexplicably. You know you didn't obtain it yourself, but it's there, and no one you can find can either explain it or owns up to providing it. You have lingering, gnawing questions about who provided it, paid for it, etc. Life is learning how to enjoy the ice cream without having to have those answers.

Spirits fly on dangerous missions
Imaginations on fire

[birdlike 0]

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>So if God were to make something in His image, it would be an entity
>that has 1) an Intellect and 2) has Creative powers.

Except that:

1) "In his image" implies "looks like him."

2) In the Christian creation story, man was not created with much intellect. His theft of fruit from the tree of knowledge became his first sin; the sin of trying to be like God.

The irony of that is stinging. It was the ultimate sin, to try to be like God. But God makes it clear that he is all that is good, all-forgiving (as we are told to be), containing the ultimate truth. Why, then, is it bad to try to emulate God, or to "try to be like him"? You'd think God would like that.

Or were Adam and Eve supposedly eating fruit that they believed would make them God's equals or something? Like, usurpers?

Spirits fly on dangerous missions
Imaginations on fire

[JackC 0]

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Hypothetically speaking, if God does truly exist; why would it not be possible for Him to make His existence known privately to an individual? How can any one of us prove that this has not happened? If you wish, you can apply this question to the boogie man or the flying spaghetti monster.

Hypothetically speaking, yes God or the boogieman or the FSM could personally reveal themselves to someone. What I'm saying is that even if they did, the results would be indistinguishable from a halucination. Since halucinations are known to exist, are common and easy to induce whereas the number of known entities capable of producing a revealation is still zero, the odds are vastly in favour of the halucination. So even if you did have the mac-daddy of all revealations, the fact that it could have been caused by a halucination means that you still have to treat it with skepticism. Therefore revealation isn't evidence. That's not science, it's common sense.

[birdlike 0]

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How is it you can believe matter is and has always been, but it's so hard to believe a higher power exists and always has?

This is hilarious. You somehow don't realize that the same exact challenge can be made about the god you believe in, and when atheists/agnostics make that challenge, believers dismiss it. Now you're using it?!

Why can you sit back and say that God has always existed, but we can't claim equally that there's no God, and there was no necessity for one to create the universe because the universe has always existed?

I didn't say you couldn't. What I'm knocking is that you're so definitively positive that there is no way there is a God.

Then your mistake is lumping me with the rest of the people who might be saying that.

I avow that I am an agnostic, not an atheist. I strongly feel that there is no God, but I don't claim that "there is no God." The latter would be a claim to KNOW, and I do not claim to KNOW.

Believers claim to KNOW there IS a God, while agnostics say that there can be no proof either way. (I suppose that means that many lean toward belief that there isn't one.)

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I'm not telling you to change your views. You believe what you want, just as I do.

And when believers confront non-believers and claim that, "Hey, sorry, my faith demands that I try to make a believer out of you, or kill you"? What then?

We need an answer, because throughout history, that's been how it works.

What do we do when the believers won't leave us non-believers alone? You talk a good game about, "You believe your thing, I'll believe mine," but when it all comes down, rarely if ever do believers live up to that assurance.

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My intent with the original post was to see if there have been any theories that have come about as to how things began. Last input I'd gotten on theories was in high school. You stated that science proves nothing. Ignorance by definition.

I don't actually believe that science proves nothing. I just recognize that scientific pursuit does not claim to provide proof. It really just analyzes and weighs possibilities, and discards those that it finds cannot be sustained as true explanations of things. If someone wanted to claim that duck farts are the source of all atmospheric nitrogen, science would disprove that hypothesis in short order, but would not claim to have proven what does produce atmospheric nitrogen.

Spirits fly on dangerous missions
Imaginations on fire

[birdlike 0]

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I fixed it for you. You assume there is a god out there.

Using the word 'assume' is an insult to Speedracer. Reading his posts over the years, I think he believes there is a god out there. He's entitled to that belief as much as you are entitled to yours.

Especially since this God he believes in left us all here to wallow in violence as we FIGHT OUT whether he exists at all! Quite a shitty, dick-ish thing to do if you're all-knowing and all-loving. Thanks a fuckin' lot, "God."

Spirits fly on dangerous missions
Imaginations on fire

[birdlike 0]

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Till there is any evidence of any deity it is an assumption no matter how much anyone believes in it.

SCORE!
That point is unassailable. Nice job!

Spirits fly on dangerous missions
Imaginations on fire

[birdlike 0]

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I'm a scientist scratching away at trying to untangle all of the tiny receptors & enzymes that make up the metabolism of a cell.

It seems to me that someone a LOT smarter than me set all this up, since all of us scientists have been busting our butts for years and have only scratched the surface of being able to figure out how all this shit works.

So is an accident smarter than a human being?

An accident that had billions of years to turn into what we see today? Versus a human being who's been around for less than the blink of an eye, and expects that in the same 100 year period of even discovering DNA we'd have it all figured out?
You bet it's unreasonable to think that humans would have beaten the mystery by now. Have you considered how short a period it's really been that we have been studying this?

Spirits fly on dangerous missions
Imaginations on fire

[birdlike 0]

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Till there is any evidence of any deity it is an assumption no matter how much anyone believes in it.

How do you know there isn't any evidence? There may be such a thing as private revelation. Can you prove that God has not made His existence known to an individual?

No, but neither can that individual prove to anyone outside himself that he's had anything more than a delusion, right?

How many lunatics in the insane asylums of the world claim to be Jesus Christ? Are we really obligated to consider that maybe Jesus decided to come back en masse and none of them are actually crazy, because they're all part of the "Legion Jesus"?

Spirits fly on dangerous missions
Imaginations on fire

[birdlike 0]

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Hypothetically speaking, if God does truly exist; why would it not be possible for Him to make His existence known privately to an individual? How can any one of us prove that this has not happened? If you wish, you can apply this question to the boogie man or the flying spaghetti monster.

HEY! Don't you DARE go blaspheming and taking the name of my god in vain, lest he smite you with His Noodly Appendage!

As for the "personal revelation," I think that anyone who had one that convinced him he had been talked to by God is free to either take it at face value, or wonder what the true origin of the contact had been.

We can tautologize and say that if an all-powerful God revealed himself to a single individual in a personal revelation, he would have the magic necessary to cause the person to know that it was genuine, and not a hallucination or delusion. But then you can always ask, how does he know that that is not itself a delusion?

Spirits fly on dangerous missions
Imaginations on fire

[SpeedRacer 1]

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So then, barring space aliens (whose status, as physical beings, would be the same as ours), who or what is the most supreme intelligence in the universe?

The term "the most supreme intelligence" does not make any sense to me, same as "the most powerful thing in the universe". Those are religious terms which seems to have no applicable value outside the religion value system.

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I'm a scientist scratching away at trying to untangle all of the tiny receptors & enzymes that make up the metabolism of a cell. It seems to me that someone a LOT smarter than me set all this up, since all of us scientists have been busting our butts for years and have only scratched the surface of being able to figure out how all this shit works.

This is the old argument, which has been already explained multiple times. Let me quote John A. Paulos' "Irreligion":


How is it that modern free-market economies are complex as they are, boasting amazingly elaborate production, distribution, and communication systems? Go into almost every drug store, and you can find your favorite candy bar. Every supermarket has your brand of spaghetti sauce, or the store down the block does. Your size and style of jeans are in every neighborhood.
And what is true on personal level is true at the industrial level. Somehow there is enough ball bearings and computer chips in the right places in factories all over the country. Oil and gas supplies are, by and large, where they're needed . Your e-mail reaches you in Miami as well as in Milwaukee, not to mention Barcelona and Bangkok.
The natural question, discussed first by Adam Smith and later by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, among others, is, Who designed this marvel of complexity? Which commissar decreed the number of dental flosses for each retail outlet? The answer is that, of course, no economical god designed this system. It emerged and grew by itself, a stunningly obvious example of spontaneously evolving order. No one argues that ALL the components of the candy bar production and distribution system must have been put in place at once, or else there would be no Snickers at the corner store.

You've brought up some excellent points.

First of all (I don't know why I have to keep reminding people of this) I do believe in the Big Bang, Evolution, a 4.5 billion year old Earth, etc.

The complexity of the economic system is made up of the actions of the human beings who partake in it.

And those human beings evolved from other life forms over many many years.

Go back to Precambrian times, and you even have prokarotic cells coming together to form the first eukaryotic cell.

Go back further than that, and you have RNA and amino acids assembling to form the precursors of life on this planet.

My point is that at the very level of the atom itself, matter was endowed with this nature to assemble itself into beings with minds capable of even pondering these questions in the first place. As has been said before "We are Nature's way of Knowing Itself."


Now sitting here billions of years later, it is easy to become very blase about the whole thing, and say, "well of course, this is what happened. BFD! It couldn't have been any other way, it just all eventually fell together by accident!"

But the only reason you think that is because your brain & your way of thinking is a product of the specific evolutionary process that took place in the context of this specific universe.

You & I are limited in this respect. The entire makeup of physics itself could have been done in a way that we couldn't even wrap our minds around. So we can't say "It couldn't have been any other way" because we are limited by our context within this universe.

The fact is that matter & energy were endowed, from the very beginning, with a quality such that it would eventually produce (in the face of entropy) entities which are capable of knowledge, self-awareness, and being able to ponder these questions in the first place. (Alternatively, there could have been a universe where nothing as complex as a human evolved, or one where there were beings who simply lived to breathe, eat, shit and fuck, & had no spiritual side to them whatsoever, maybe like the Borg in Star Trek Next Generation)

Why was matter and energy given these qualities? Believer believe there is a reason behind all of this.

Speed Racer
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[maadmax 0]

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Till there is any evidence of any deity it is an assumption no matter how much anyone believes in it .

SCORE!
That point is unassailable. Nice job!

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Same thing can be said about 95% of the matter and energy that make up the universe. Its presence is suspected but there is no evidence to indicate what it is. So do we just assume it doesn't exist?

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[beowulf 1]

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Till there is any evidence of any deity it is an assumption no matter how much anyone believes in it .

SCORE!
That point is unassailable. Nice job!

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Same thing can be said about 95% of the matter and energy that make up the universe. Its presence is suspected but there is no evidence to indicate what it is. So do we just assume it doesn't exist?

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Not the same thing, but you can think it is. All deitys have one thing in common. None of them have any evidence of their existence. Suspecting that there are many other galaxies and planets out there based on the planets and galaxies that we can see is logically sound. Believing in any deity is not logically sound.

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[Lucky... 0]

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Of the many people in this world, those that believe in a higher power feel this world was created. Others have the big bang theory, as well as many more thoughts and theories. Regardless of your faith or belief, you probably have some idea as to how it all began.

Science has proven long ago that matter cannot be created, nor destroyed. It can be broken apart into the smallest pieces of matter: protons, neutrons and electrons, but it never goes away.

Where do you feel it all came from?

You're right, since I can't "prove" my theory I must default to the Jebus theory. Like how you didn't show evolution as a possible theory, considering it and Charlie are the 2 most believed theories in the US. Big bang is a more obscurely believed theory, not to say it's less likely and may work in concert with other theories.

Love how creationists disclaim evolution and big bang, yet draw believability to Charlie throwing his magic dust around and making entire planets, down to every molecule..... that is far more far-fetched to me.

[Andrewwhyte 1]

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Till there is any evidence of any deity it is an assumption no matter how much anyone believes in it .

SCORE!
That point is unassailable. Nice job!

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Same thing can be said about 95% of the matter and energy that make up the universe. Its presence is suspected but there is no evidence to indicate what it is. So do we just assume it doesn't exist?

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Although there is no hard evidence as to what it is, there is evidence as to its existence; not conclusive, but some evidence. That is the difference; there is no evidence for God whatsoever. Big difference.

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