On another blog, someone made this remark:
… since cosmology and astrophysics have proven that the universe had a beginning. and we know that whatever has a beginning has a “cause.” thus, if the universe had a beginning, it had a cause; i posit *God as that cause.
First, there is no scientific “proof” that the universe had a beginning (and thus a “cause”). While various scientific fields theorize that it did … none have been able to offer inerrant and/or empirical proof of this premise.
Nonetheless, let’s put that aside for the sake of discussion and consider this person’s comment …
If a god is the “cause” behind the existence of the Universe, then this would mean it also created the several galaxies and planets and moons and black holes and other miscellaneous objects floating around in the cosmos, yes?
Now, if we accept this as a truth, does not the question become … why would such an all-powerful entity create and then place human beings on THIS particular planet? When one considers the sum total of this entity’s abilities, does this not seem a bit incredulous?
And even more to the question, why would this supernatural entity require this created physical being to jump through multiple hoops and follow arbitrary rules in order to receive some future discretionary reward?
Now let’s go a bit further and do a thought exercise.
As difficult as it may be for some folk, let’s assume the Universe actually had NO beginning … and thus NO “cause” (i.e., no supernatural entity). Next, let’s weigh the idea that the existence of human beings (and the multitude of other creatures) on this particular planet was simply a cosmological burp.
Taking it a step further and allowing ourselves to consider this possibility, what then? What would life be like if there were no belief in or discussions about a supernatural creator? Would things be dissimilar to what they are now? Would “human nature” be any different than it is today? Would the overall environment on this world be any more or less peaceful? Would humans view each other as equals?
Use your imagination! Step away from “the way things are” and see what you can come up with.
Nan's Notebook 
From most scientists, I think they tend to believe there was no actual beginning…quantum jumping in and out of reality and all that…
But if a god did create this universe or even an endless amount of universes, then what was the cause of god’s own creation? If a self created god could occur, then a universe could also self create.
As far as us being here on earth, simply means it was random with planets with certain conditions. I know you believe we are it, while I believe there are more, but it’s still like a seed. Some have conditions and become a plant and others never achieve any life.
And any creative force, be it supernatural or simply science, will not care two whits about how the said life behaves, what it believes, what it achieves or how it dies. To think otherwise, is pure narcissism.
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All the elements, including moisture and heat which came together on Earth to create life, are common to the universe. Life could just as well be getting started somewhere else or in several places in the universe. If we give some god or goddess credit for creating life and mankind, then we may also ask if a god, all-powerful and all-knowing, is behind it, why did it take billions of years to bring about? Are we an example of its best work? He/She/It has created us with all these flaws and weaknesses and then presumes to condemn us to hell fire and damnation if we do not overcome His/Her/Its failure of design, material, and workmanship.
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I LOVE your last sentence!
Yet there are those (as indicated by another person’s comment on this post) who are CERTAIN that we are the result of some nebulous entity who, apparently, got lonely after creating the entire universe and needed some company.
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Yeah. They taught that in my Sunday School, too.
I remember asking one teacher/preacher where God came from, and he showed me where in the bible where it says, “… and the Lord came from Teman.” It is really in there, but it has nothing to do with ‘where God came from.’
At a later time, in my adulthood, when I was still sucking up the BS, I asked a more informed apologist, and he explained to me that God always existed. He was not created or born. He just was. So much for ’cause and effect,’ huh?
I’m not very good at defending religion, but we need to try to be fair with those who cannot escape it. It is just like the breath of life to some. Someone identified it as the opiate of the masses. That is true.
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your last sentence sums up my misotheism perfectly. Judgement? How dare he/she/it judge us!!! Our sins are the result of his failures as a creator. We judge it!!!!
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I posit an everything bagel as the cause.
Equally likely!
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they throw this out like it is just so. but your bagel is more likely because bagels are real 🤪
I am not sure the human world could be any different given that sedentary, urban, hierarchical societies seem to need a god of sone kind for social control?
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I posit that it doesn’t matter one whit. We are where we are, and what happened tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago ain’t gonna help us now!
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… since cosmology and astrophysics have proven that the universe had a beginning. and we know that whatever has a beginning has a “cause.” thus, if the universe had a beginning, it had a cause; i posit *God as that cause.
What kind of people make a false statement and then presume to use it for argument and expect we would let it go without questioning? It should be clear now why the Christian Nationalists want all education to be under the control of the church. Knowledge is a dangerous challenge to religion and is met with fear and fury.
I’m not sure we would be much different if gods and religion were never created. We can find enough examples of people, other than ‘religious’ people, who are willing to treat their fellows as cruelly as possible. It is a theme that runs through religions but is not theirs exclusively. Fear and hatred are too basic to humans to be foisted off on any one group. We all have that capacity, but most of us don’t have to have an enemy to relieve our frustrations on.
The state always has that ability. Religions, Christians, assume it for themselves when possible. Both use the other for plausible deniability.
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The part about fear and hatred is, regrettably, far too accurate. And it exists even among those who believe, as this person does, that “God is the cause.”
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“What kind of people make a false statement and then presume to use it for argument?” Believers, of course. Not just religious believers, but believers in science and all kinds of other things. They cannot conceptualize anything just “being there,” because that would destroy all their beliefs, and their lives are built on beliefs. They believe they would be nothing without beliefs!
The real question we should be asking is not where did the universe come from, it’s just a bunch of condensed energy revolving around other condensed energy — if we can believe science, which I only do as far as I can experience it. No, the biggest question for me is: “Where did life come from?” Which begs the prior question, “What exactly is life anyway?” The best answer I have is still 42!
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To answer your question, Nan, could take a trilogy of books with unlimited additions. (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy started as a stand-alone, became a trilogy, and which now has 5 components as of my last reading.)
What would life be like if there were no belief in or discussions about a supernatutral creator? I could ask two totally unrelated questions, and work from either one.
First, would there even be life in the universe? I would like to think there would be, because I “believe” there would be, but there is no way to know for sure. Life might have been dependent on a Creator (barf, barf) to start it. That is always a possibility.
Second, could life have predated the universe? This is where I would most probably argue from, that some kind of life existed before the universe, but it needed a “playground” of some kind to cavort in, so life “manufactured” the universe for its own enjoyment. (Obviously I am not theorizing life is a supernatural being, just something we cannot conceptualize or understand.)
But neither of those are ideas you are asking us to consider. Your thought experiment is conditional to life having happened, and I presume the condition that humans evolved as a species of life, as science would have us believe (and until further discovery I will go along with this condition: Life happened, and homo sapiens evolved.)
The apparent fact is, humans would have evolved some kind of religious nonsense, whatevr they called it, because that is what happened.
In my personal philosophy religion is a prodict of fear, and since we are talking human nature, it is the nature of humans to fear that which they do not understand. And since early people had no science to teach them anything about nature, it was inevitable that religion would develop.
This probably does not give you what you are looking for, but I can see no way in our existence not to create religion, though it may not have looked exactly as it does today. Many things were possible, but given that almost every society/culture on earth developed the idea of gods, I think that was pretty much inevitable too. (This “universality of belief in gods” may have been because the idea of gods predated our exodus from Africa, which is entirely possible too.) But one way or the other gods were going to be created, and eventually one group was going to declare their gods dominant over other gods, because that too is human nature.
I think you get the picture I am trying to paint, so I will end this here. I could go on, but why? It’s past my bedtime, 🤣!
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You make some good points. But as I was reading your comment, the thought occurred to me that “life” exists in many forms on this planet. And some of it is quite intelligent in its own way! Is it also possible that these other creatures developed a belief in some supernatural being and we just don’t know about it because they’re not capable of communicating with us? Hmmm.
I suppose it all goes back to what you “posit.” 😉
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To me, all life is One Life, divided into individual cells. Everything has its own form of intelligence — but humans are too homocentric to be able to consider what other species do as intelligent.
And they can easily have their own philosophies and/or relligions — they certainly can feel fear when they are being chased by their predators, or they wouldn’t try to get away (in contrast to the Dodo birds, who let humans slaughter them. They should have felt fear, but did not seem to!)
But, for me there is no sign of competing religions amongst most species, the way humans have competing religions, so either they have no religion or they all have the same religion. (Based on observation.) I’m thinking they have no religion, except maybe ants and termites.
Fear is my basis for human religion, but that is a different fear than the fear of being eaten, or killed. Even plants are now known to feel fear of various things attacking them. But I personally do not think they fear being killed by individuals of their own species, like humans do. But this is getting off track.
About communication with humans, I believe that is purely on us. If we do not believe other species can be intelligent, how can we accept they might be trying to communicate with us. (I will never forget the time I walked into an apartment and suddenly was overwhelmed with a horrible thirst, though I myself was not thirsty. When I looked around there were plants in the apartment, but they had been neglected, and every one of them was bone dry. I rushed around, putting water in all the plant pots, and that feeling of thirst was replaced by a feeling of a kind of gratitude. When I talked to the owner of the apartment, she told me she had been staying elsewhere for two weeks, and never even thought about her plants. But their need was so great they communicated with me, and I was able to rectify their plight.)
That was my first real sign that other species can communicate with us, and I have never forgotten that lesson.
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Why is it that there are many billions of planets yet the Bible mentions only the Earth as a flat planet and makes references to the sun, moon and hung stars not understanding what a planet is. Pathetic really and easily seen by common sense people as BS.
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Good points! And isn’t it interesting that (most) believers “overlook” the part about the bible’s description of a flat earth? And those that do see it as such reject the idea of being part of a universe, so for them, this whole discussion is moot. 🤪
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Science and religion started out with about equal ability to explain life and its vagaries.
I would think that a creator-God would have had better information to pass on to His followers, but the truth is, God only had/has the abilities men gave It. The biblical description of creation can only reach to the highest understanding that men had at that time. The six-thousand-year-old earth is not a fantasy in some minds to this day. A large number of philosophers have concluded that if our reasoning and logic don’t lead us to declare that God created the earth, all our work is worthless.
Science, thankfully, has taken a different approach. Only those things that we can prove as factual and true are to be accepted. That doesn’t mean that science has always been right or that it has all the answers. They make mistakes, too, but their philosophy is to find and remove the errors and correct them. I like this quote from Ann Druyan, “Science is the only practice that rewards you for proving them wrong.”
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Its very simple to come to a right conclusion that God did it because matter has no intelligence to self assemble itself which is favorable for life.God is an intelligent personality therefore without his intervention matter has no power to move or take some shape. Just like for example a clay takes shape of a pot or doll when it is shaped by and expert potter.
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For folks like you, Anantha, imagination has been severely restricted by a belief in an imaginary god. And that’s a shame.
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Well, you have closed down the argument in your statement that only God is the right conclusion. Maybe Descartes is your favorite philosopher. Maybe you hold to the 6000-year-old earth scripture. Maybe you believe the sun orbits the Earth.
I believe there was life before there was intelligence. Fungi are among the earth’s oldest life forms, but they still haven’t learned to talk or walk or to reason, or to feel an awareness of themselves. Intelligence has taken billions of years to develop to this point, and we should hope that it continues to develop.
Back to your potter. The potter has a responsibility to produce a usable product. If he creates something with a flaw, then it is his/her responsibility to return that clay to the pug mill and try his creation again. It is not the fault of the clay for how it is shaped. If the potter wants to be successful, then he/she/it must produce vessels, or dolls, that are fault-free and saleable. The clay doesn’t know when it is fit for the market.
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Except we have demonstrated self-assembly of complex molecules in the lab. Harold Urey’s experiment producing amino acids from simple compounds, electric sparks and a reasonable facsimile of the atmosphere back on pre-biotic earth.
More modern work in this vein have demonstrated the catalytic abilities of clay and organic films on rock to produce complex organic molecules.
Sure it takes a long long time to go from that to ‘life’ , but time was the one thing in abundance; no one easily grasps how long a billion years is.
https://www.science.org/content/article/self-assembling-molecules-offer-new-clues-lifes-possible-origin
(and your argument is formally known as ‘The Watch-maker analogy’ https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker_analogy )
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“Why is it that there are many billions of planets yet the Bible mentions only the Earth as a flat planet and makes references to the sun, moon and hung
Stars”. Because there is life only in the earth planet and not in billions of planet.
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While I tend to agree that life exists only on this planet, there is no actual proof that this is the case. So until and unless this has been verified/confirmed, none of us can make a definitive and/or authoritative statement one way or the other.
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“And even more to the question, why would this supernatural entity require this created physical being to jump through multiple hoops and follow arbitrary rules in order to receive some future discretionary reward?”
Keep in mind that all those things we give God credit for did not come from God but from men. The proof of that comes through studying the history of Christianity, down to the present day. Depending on who the pope was, we can see the changes in philosophy. It is no wonder the papist fought so hard to keep the bible out of the hands of ‘the common people.’ There has never been a time in the church that money changing hands could provide salvation and rescue from hell and the grave. Today, we have people, God’s representatives on earth, calling for the murder of people who do not conform to their perceived notion of morality. What moral high-ground do they assume in that case? Highly moral people do not call for the murder of people they will never know. They make a laughing stock of their own religion.
“Hello, Darkness, my old friend.”
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Nan? Have you given, or would you like to give, reasons you believe life can only exist on the planet Earth?
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not to answer for Nan but we had a lengthy discussion on this a couple weeks ago. My reasoning would be if we assume life is only carbon based and complex, the. the unlikely hood is such that it is older than the age of the universe and more unlikely than the number of planets. But if we define life far more broadly and strangely…who knows?
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As Brian said, this topic was discussed at length here.
Please note (which many seemed to overlook) that I underlined the words in my post: “as we know it.” 🙂
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and most importantly, define “life’. To use it to define our existence on this planet, and all the things that live along side us (and inside, too), is to limit the use of the word severely.
Life could very well be something incredibly different on another planet, or in another solar system
It’s very easy to dismiss all of it, because we can’t see or imagine it. It’s like a man who lives on a desert, and his ancestors have always lived on that same desert, and a stranger comes along, going on and on about high tides and whales and rain…and the first man looks at him as if he were possessed…He refuses to believe in anything he can’t see.
The other important thing — that we as a species are evolving still. In some cases very quickly. There was a time when your wisdom teeth were very important. Now sometimes they don’t even show up. We have no real need any longer for the appendix, the gall bladder causes more trouble than it helps, and the spleen is losing its useful status as well. And this is what has been going on for thousands of years; little by little we are changing from those fuzzy angry cousins, the apes, to something less fuzzy (well, most of the time) but almost as angry. And we continue to work our way through the changes.
I was thinking the other day, why do we strive so hard to do things? What drives us to improve ourselves sometimes up to the day we die…do we reincarnate as a more improved human? It would surely explain child prodigies…
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yes!!!!!
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What drives us is our humanity. I don’t believe we will reincarnate, just as we will not become a spiritual body. I hope we have the idea that the furtherance of knowledge, while it is important to us in our lifetime, the accumulation of what we pass on to our offspring is more so. Look what we have built on Democritus’ idea of atoms combining to become larger and different things, living and inanimate. He could not prove an atom existed, yet it is now the basis of our understanding of the universe and everything in it.
There is a higher reason for being moral and upright in our lives than the hope of being resurrected into a new life. That was and is a priestly contrivance to keep society under control. It worked o.k. when most of us were illiterate, but as knowledge has spread among us commoners, the strength of the church has waned. Just as the popes feared. Knowledge inspires critical thought. Critical thought drives out the darkness. The darkness is the only place religion has to exist.
I hope that Nan’s question can soon be answered with more than a hypothetical, half-hearted, self-induced, non-factual conjecture.
Wikipedia:
Credulity is not necessarily a belief in something that may be false: the subject of the belief may even be correct, but a credulous person will believe it without good evidence.
Let’s get on with the quest for knowledge. If God is really all-mighty, all-seeing, and all-knowing, he/she/it can take care of itself. Let’s see what kind of god needs mortals to carry their message.
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This is arguing from a sample size of exactly one.
Why do you think life only exists on this planet? Because this is the only planet you’ve got experience with, so your statement should be
“I tend to agree that we know life exists on only this planet”
There are tantalizing hints that Mars once was warm wet and had an atmosphere that could support earth-like life, but it’s not like we’ve be able to do more than have a few robots scratch the surface (literally) to look.
Plans are underway to send a probe to Titan to look explicitly for this: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasas-dragonfly-will-fly-around-titan-looking-for-origins-signs-of-life
We only confirmed the existence of planets around other stars in 1992, but we’ve found over 5000 by now. https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/counts_detail.html
With better ‘eyes’ like the Webb telescope we may be able to directly detect signs of life on some of them.
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Hints? Yes. Plans underway? Yes. Existence of many other planets? Yes. Life? No. At least not as we know it.
BTW, as I mentioned in another comment, this topic was discussed at length here, in case you want to take a look at the comments there.
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Again. You’re arguing from a sample size of one, and as others in that previous thread said, we’re not even working from a common definition of “life”…
to reduce the context ab absurdio
A person who has only ever seen a Labrador retriever dog, proclaims all dogs are Labrador retrievers and denies that Chihuahas can exist.
We have quite literally no idea if life is common or rare in the Universe, because we currently have no way of detecting its absence or presence.
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I totally agree with your last statement. But it’s fun to speculate … and that’s why I wrote the other post.
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They are also using spectrographs to analyze light to see what elements may exist in these new-found planets. Anything showing organic elements would be worth a closer look.
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There are more odds that life exists within the many billions of planets in some form or another than it does not. In fact the chances are far more credible than any of the thousands of gods including your God actually existing. It is obviously clear your God inspired Bible scribes simply had no idea of what a planet was.
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Your proof being what?
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proof is probably impossible given current technology and the reality of space and time. And other people have guessed at the odds and came to different conclusions.
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Proof is impossible. So is proving a negative, yet some of us can deny reality to the point that we can continue in blind faith in what someone wants us to believe.
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I am so amazed about our consciousness of the Universe and all kinds of life in it, that I don’t even wish to know if, and how it all began. Any “knowledge” about an eventual beginning and a, not impossible, end of the Universe will not increase my awe about its existence.
I find it difficult to understand a beginning, and I find it equally problematic to comprehend that it has been like this “always”.
In this connection, I reject any notion of a supernatural creator (what is ‘supernatural’ anyway?). Even if science would irrefutably “prove” such a reality, we would go on asking the same questions.
This said, I must also say that I am amused with debates on these topics, at home and on the internet!
.&
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“I find it difficult to understand a beginning, and I find it equally problematic to comprehend that it has been like this “always”.”
Because humans really have a poor conception of how LONG time frames are in the universe. to people for whom a hundred years is a long time and a thousand is a REALLY long time, a billion years is on the order of “One, Two, Three, Many” in our minds.
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How old is the universe? 13.787±0.020 billion years.
The average lifetime of a human is 76.1 years. There is no way we can grasp the enormity of that number. 13.8 billion, +or – .020 billion. And now, with the JWST, we are facing either the need to change the calculation for the age of the universe or recalculate the time necessary for a galaxy to form. I am confident that science will make the right corrections or the best they can come up with on such short notice. It is much easier when your laws are not set in stone.
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Well said, Nan.
Best wishes, Pete.
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No opinion on my speculation?
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I have no belief in any religion, deity, or creation theory. I am not very scientific, but as the scientists still say they do not know how big the universe is, or where it might ‘end’, if indeed it has an end, then I simply presume that planet Earth was one of the few planets in the universe capable of sustaining animal life, some of which evolved into humans.
Best wishes, Pete.
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Thanks! I always appreciate feedback from other folks … whether they agree, disagree, or have a different perspective. That’s what makes blogging fun! 😁
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The fact that our current version of the universe had a beginning just means that it was once different than it now is. If there was a cause for that change, there’s no indication that the cause was a “who”. In the past when we have found the cause of some mysterious part of our natural universe, the cause has always turned out to be a “what”, not a “who”. Lightning, tides, seasons, etc, all are caused by a “what” (natural forces) rather than a “who” (some god). The theists are just assuming the “cause” of the universe is not only a “who” but is conveniently their favorite bronze-age tribal war god. Sheesh.
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BINGO!
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I’m glad you used the term ‘current version.’ The ability to discard things that were once ‘undeniable fact’ is what puts science far and away out of the reach of religion in the sense of truth and fact.
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Excellent point!
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The universe was started by me, ok?! I made it. So, there, case closed. I’m god.
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Sorry. I keep forgetting …
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it’s why the universe is so…difficult…dontcha know???🤪🤪🤪
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The fundamental issue with the first cause argument is, what caused the first cause? And if the first cause, God, can make do without a cause, then so can the universe.
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I like your thinking! 😊
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Dear atheist. Just keep one thing at the back of your mind. God is beyond our material thinking and calculation because he is spiritual and eternal. It needs special mercy of God to understand about him and his eternal nature. What you people discussed and deliberated in this article we also know. You people are calculating God on the basis of your material logic and intelligence. No ordinary human being in this world can imagine about something which has no beginning and end because whatever he sees and experience in this material world has beginning and end. So bonafide scriptures presents about eternal aspect of nature and one who is sinless and accepts the words of scriptures can only understand its essence of eternal truth.
Therefore, those who don’t have any sense of discrimination between sin and good deeds according to scriptures have no access to understand about the ultimate spiritual truth or God.
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And that, dear readers, is your sermon for the week! 🙏⛪
P.S. I promise this is the last one.
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“Therefore, those who don’t have any sense of discrimination between sin and good deeds according to scriptures have no access to understand about the ultimate spiritual truth or God.”
That is a false, ignorant, but a very telling statement. It does prove, however, that some people really need a god. They cannot function without that broken reed to lean on.
“There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception.” – Mortimer J. Adler
“There is no one who would not rather appear to know than to be taught.” – Quintilian
“The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.” – H.L. Mencken
“By disobeying god, we escape from his totalitarian prison where you cannot ask any questions, where you must never question authority. We become our human selves,” Ann Druyan wrote in The Skeptical Inquirer (November/December 2003).
“Ignorant men always imagine that he who speaks to them of things which they do not understand, is a very wise and learned man. This is the true principle of the credulity of nations, and of the authority of those who pretend to guide them.” baron d’ Paul Henri Thiry Holbach. Superstition In All Ages (1732) / Common Sense
No god was ever in advance of the nation that created him.
Robert Green Ingersoll. The Gods / From ‘The Gods and Other Lectures’
On the other side, if God Himself was not able to render human nature sinless, what right had He to punish men for not being sinless? baron d’ Paul Henri Thiry Holbach. Superstition In All Ages (1732) / Common Sense
Lactantius:
More than two thousand years ago, according to Lactance, the wise Epicure said: “Either God wants to prevent evil, and can not, or He can and will not; or He neither can nor will, or He will and can.
“The first principle of our study we will derive from this, that no thing is ever by divine power produced from nothing.”
Lucretius The Nature of Things Bk. 1 line 149-150
On Creation:
“Democritus posited the fixed and “necessary” laws of a purely mechanical system, in which there was no room for an intelligent cause working toward an end.
He explained the origin of the universe as follows. The original motion of the atoms was in all directions—it was a sort of “vibration”; hence there resulted collisions and, in particular, a whirling movement, whereby similar atoms were brought together and united to form larger bodies and worlds. This happened not as the result of any purpose or design but rather merely as the result of “necessity”; i.e., it is the normal manifestation of the nature of the atoms themselves.”
“It happened by accident,” said Epicurus, which drove the ‘creationists’ crazy.
Finally, “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
Richard Dawkins
Thank you for addressing me as an Atheist. I was raised, apparently, under the Christianity that you still hold to. I’m poorly educated, but I can read. I’ve tried to give the name of every person cited. I suppose you recognize them as godless, evil, deceitful people. Their texts are just as infallible as the scripture you depend on.
Where is The Ark of God today? Where are those stone tablets you so revere? Did either of them ever really exist? Christianity is no more credible than any religion it holds in contempt. I invite you to step out of the stone age mentality. Your choice.
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a bunch of just so claims, arrogant threats, and confusion. As I have said before, your evil god needs to beg for our forgiveness for his monumental screwup.
Sorry Nan, could t resist.
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I posit Universe Creating Pixies as the first cause to the universe. They have always existed beyond human reason and that is why they are – infact, they have to be – not a popular belief. See, what I have done here is explained away the unknown. And now that I have revealed this truth to you, you owe your devotion to these pixies, without whom you would not even exist.
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You’re right! We need to HONOR those pixies! What do you suggest? A special book written on their behalf? A building dedicated to the Holy Pixies? Specially designed robes with Pixie images to honor their presence? An icon of the Head Pixie that can be worn as a necklace?
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Could we put all that on the Dome of The Rock?
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Make them everything bagels!
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It’s bagels, all the way down
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Oh, and by the way, unless you did not already guess it (I bet you did, because the Pixies already told you) you now owe me some 10% of your income to me for initiating you to this truth. Or if you don’t pay, the Pixies will torture you in the afterlife for an etrnity with Finnish folk music. Do not say my position is absurd; it hardly differs from all the great world religions, exept that my position is actually confirmed by it’s absurdity.
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Excellent logic.
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And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon God they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the signs said
“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls”
And whisper’d in the sounds of silence
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As i expected. Nan, you can speak all nonsense but it is not going to change the truth. You are very expert in avoiding the truth and you never touched the eternal aspect of my comments. your and your fellow atheist comments are immature childish. One child is appreciating other childish response that doesn’t make this discussion logical and matured. I came to this blog to check your intelligence and honesty but you have demonstrated that you and your fellow atheist are not. Just like we cannot make a dog to understand about God similarly we cannot make a cheating sinful obstinate atheist to understand about divine nature of God and workings of material nature.
Cheers
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From where I sit, you are the one who is being immature and childish. Furthermore, you are (and have been) disregarding my Blog Rules that state: … anyone who attacks or makes belittling comments related to the beliefs, character, or lifestyle of other visitors will not be tolerated.
Therefore, this is the last comment from you that I’m allowing.
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It is interresting, how the so called “Kalam” cosmological argument creeps up again and again, even though it has been refuted and debunked over and over again throughout centuries – mostly by theologians, no less! The weak points are:
The argument rests on the claim, that everything wich exist must have a cause, but tries to posit this as an excuse for something to exist, that supposedly had no cause. Therefore, it is oxymoronic, moronic and pointless.
As the first cause it posits an intelligence, that the claimant argues is the specific deity from their own cultural heritage without giving any reason, why this would be the case. But from everything we know about biology intelligence is given rise by evolution and not the other way round. Indeed nothing in the universe suggests an intelligent design, quite the opposite. It appears mostly to consist of void, gasses and a random rock here and there. Who can claim, that looks like the work of an intelligence? At best it would look like the work of a total lunatic! The excuse for that, that the creator mind is so great we mere humans can not see the intelligence in it, is a copout, counter intuitive and in direct conflict with the claim, that the intelligence in “creation” is observable.
The claim of design behind nature is often defended by a strawman, that either everything happens by design, or by accident. However, most things in the natural universe appear not to happen by either. Instead, what we observe are processes. Material elements and objects reacting to each other. That is how stars, starsystems and galaxies form. That is how life appeared at least on this one planet among the billions of planets in the universe. Some of the processes are simple, some get complex as they develope and evolve, and some are extremely complex, but nothing suggests complex processes need intelligence, or design.
It seems to me that such argumentation like the “Kalam” linger despite their obvious stupidity more out of need of the believers to protect their fragile identities based on beliefs assumed on poor reasons, rather than to convince us non-believers, because when the weaknesses of this kind of argumentation is ever pointed out in a discussion, it never leads to the believer to recant, or even re-evaluate their position. The belief was never based on this poor argumentation, that was only summoned, so the believer would have something to throw at the disbeliever.
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We often think our arguments are better than they really are. I’ve interacted with plenty of people who think they have these stellar and impeccable arguments that personally I thought were pretty weak; I am sure they felt the same about mine. For example, the versions of Kalam I have seen states, “Whatever begins to exist must have a cause,” which is a bit different than “everything which exists must have a cause.” The difference is subtle, but there is a difference. Someone could easily respond that you’re engaging a Strawman version of the argument and therefore not find your rebuttals convincing.
If you can’t convince a theist and they can’t convince you because of how bad their reasoning is, then this would suggest all responses to people are futile. However, sometimes an argument is worth making simply to articulate a point the other person (or third party readers) may not have considered or see how our own arguments stand up to scrutiny when someone pushes back. Likewise, sometimes one has to decide when it is or is not worth time.
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Indeed. Besides, one really does not know how a nother person is going to react, before trying out. Yet, it may feel frustraiting to realize the other party was not engaged in a discussion, rather they were there to reinforce their biases. Once again I also blame competetive culture, that turns some people into a mode they do not listen, but seek to find means to defeat the other person, as if to find themselves mistaken would cause them to lose, when in reality finding out about the reality is closer to winning. It is the perverted fear of losing, that seems to stem from this ingrained notion of the world being divided into winners and losers, wich causes people to reveal their weaknesses (even from themselves). As the unwillingnes to learn or challenge their own perspective is the real weakness of character. It is OK to have weakness and to lose, as long as it does not lead to suffering.
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Nothing is “proven.” They’re theories. But no matter.
The solution is easy. “Prove” (not “posit”) any god and everything else falls immediately into place. Otherwise it’s god of the gaps. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
I am an “always existed” person regarding the Universe. Also, I cannot conceive of there being nothing then the god (also nothing?) decides “I want something.”
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I’ve come to the conclusion that those people who believe God exists don’t like to question. It’s safer and easier just to believe.
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HA! Have you noticed that too??? 😈
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lol Yep.
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I think Big Bang is the modern Myth created by the science community to quench our thirst of knowing everything. As the great thinker Socrates said – “The greatest wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing”
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Hello Kaiash! Thank you for joining the several others who follow this blog. I like what you wrote in your comment! 🙂
I hope you will visit again … and often.
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Nan, your putting your arguments based on your atheistic ideology and not on basis of science and logic. Of course as per atheist argument they think that their brains are built up by brainless energies and without a cause. That’s demonstrates stupidity of this article. Moreover your fellow atheist argument of uri and stanley miller experiments did not create a life in a test tube it just created only 4/21 amino acid group which is just a building block of proteins by an intervention of intelligent scientist using reducing gases. Thanks Nan, you and your fellow atheist proved the existence of God. Yay.
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Anantha, I’ve read your remarks on other blogs and it’s quite obvious you are more interested in slamming atheism (and insulting atheists) than you are in adding to the discussion of the post topic. Therefore, unless you can contribute something that is directly related to this (or any) post topic, your input is not welcome on my blog.
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Nope, I just answered to one of your fellow atheist comments. Moreover when it comes to discussion there is no question of insult. I have to point out the truth with gravity. The stupidity of your article is you are placing your arguments based on a causeless factor which itself is unscientific and not practical.
I already indicated in my early comments matter has no intelligence and power to assemble itself which also includes organic matter. Suppose if I say to Nan. That medcidez benz car came by itself without a cause by accidental arrangements of metals and alloys. What will be your reply?. You have not seen somebody expertly putting those spare parts in its precise position but still while looking at the car we say this car is beautifully designed.
Similarly our earth planet is a design because there are not only rocks and oceans but various layers of atmosphere and ozone layer which is favorable for sustenance of life. There are laws of nature our nature is not working blindly or randomly. There is right gravity, heat and light in our earth.
I also indicated God is not ordinary human being like us he is spiritual and eternal but you people ignored this point and keep on beating the same bush of scientific evidence. The scientific evidence is in the precise arrangement of matter with a purpose but you people don’t want to admit this fact and keep on speaking like a moron and insult God without any logic or brain.
Nan, have you ever loved God sincerely. You demand, order and test God for something which you don’t deserve in this life You foolishly blindly conclude since God had not answered my prayers there is no God. Think if there is no god as per your deliberations we theist also praying to God and sometimes God also is not answering to our prayers but still how is that we still believe in God?. Its not that our father has to fulfill all our demands sometimes he will not give what is not good to us and sometimes he will give what is needed to us. Sometimes he can chastise by punishing us for a good cause.
Lord Jeasus Christ said love thou God with your heart and soul and then only you can see God. Selfless love towards God is the topmost qualification to see God face to face. We cannot see or understand God by material logic, experiment or by any scientific technology. If you hate God how he will reveal himself to you?.
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You (again) referenced “atheists” (although the word is not mentioned anywhere in my post) and continue to (wrongfully) claim the post is an atheist POV. In reality, all I was doing is asking readers to use their imagination related to how people would live -IF- the belief in a supernatural entity never happened.
In this latest comment of yours, since you (more or less) expressed your opinions related to the inquiry I made in my post, I’m allowing your remarks. I feel certain some of my readers will want to respond.
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