Do you believe in God and why

[VincentRJ]

2 minutes ago, canuckamuck said:

All just physical reactions. Not at all the same sort of complexity.

Do you think life does not depend on physical reactions? There's a vast range of complexity from the basic Hydrogen atom, to the most primitive form of life, to the most advanced forms of life.

[canuckamuck]

Just now, VincentRJ said:

Do you think life does not depend on physical reactions? There's a vast range of complexity from the basic Hydrogen atom, to the most primitive form of life, to the most advanced forms of life.

I think life depends on complex chemical and physical relationships which are encoded in the DNA. Hydrogen atoms are also very complex. But we are talking about life from raw materials without assistance.

[Liverpudlian]

I am an ALIEN and way way older than this topic !

[VincentRJ]

2 minutes ago, canuckamuck said:

I think life depends on complex chemical and physical relationships which are encoded in the DNA. Hydrogen atoms are also very complex. But we are talking about life from raw materials without assistance.

Hydrogen atoms are the simplest of all atoms, consisting of just one proton and one electron. It's estimated that 75% of all the matter in the universe is Hydrogen, excluding the possible existence of Dark Matter. ????

[mauGR1]

1 minute ago, VincentRJ said:

Do you think life does not depend on physical reactions? There's a vast range of complexity from the basic Hydrogen atom, to the most primitive form of life, to the most advanced forms of life.

The order of the universe is enough for me to be sure that there is an intelligent design.

Why should you believe that things happen "on their own" is a mystery to me, and also a bit arrogant to believe that your human 5 physical senses can give you a complete perception of existence.

Do you really think that "consciousness" exists just for humans ? Lower beings have their forms of lower consciousness, it's logic to assume there are countless forms of consciousness, higher and lower, and your physical senses are totally useless to perceive it.

... But, if you think your reality is restricted to the physical realm, it's your, only your choice.

[VincentRJ]

2 minutes ago, mauGR1 said:

The order of the universe is enough for me to be sure that there is an intelligent design.

Why should you believe that things happen "on their own" is a mystery to me, and also a bit arrogant to believe that your human 5 physical senses can give you a complete perception of existence.

Do you really think that "consciousness" exists just for humans ? Lower beings have their forms of lower consciousness, it's logic to assume there are countless forms of consciousness, higher and lower, and your physical senses are totally useless to perceive it.

... But, if you think your reality is restricted to the physical realm, it's your, only your choice.

Don't be silly. If you shut off all your physical senses you usually cease to be conscious, as when sleeping or under the influence of an anesthetic. However, one can dream when asleep, and Buddhist monks can achieve a sense of inner calm which avoids the distraction of the physical senses.

[Skeptic7]

22 minutes ago, Liverpudlian said:

I am an ALIEN and way way older than this topic !

So you're 1 year old! R U God? ????

Edited November 27, 2019 by Skeptic7

[mauGR1]

2 minutes ago, VincentRJ said:

Don't be silly. If you shut off all your physical senses you usually cease to be conscious, as when sleeping or under the influence of an anesthetic. However, one can dream when asleep, and Buddhist monks can achieve a sense of inner calm which avoids the distraction of the physical senses.

Lol, who is being silly ?

Read again your own post, you are contradicting yourself in the short space of 3 lines.

[canuckamuck]

1 hour ago, VincentRJ said:

Hydrogen atoms are the simplest of all atoms, consisting of just one proton and one electron. It's estimated that 75% of all the matter in the universe is Hydrogen, excluding the possible existence of Dark Matter. ????

There is a lot more going on in a hydrogen atom than that. There are complex forces at play. There are quarks and leptons and bosons, and their various charges and forces. Some of the bosons are still undiscovered.

I wonder where they came from and why they work so well and orderly?

Edited November 27, 2019 by canuckamuck

[UncleMhee]

9 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

I choose to believe that when my body dies my life force returns to the creator ( as with all living things ). Otherwise what is the point of living a life as a human? Better to just be a cow or something and not know anything.

So in your world humans are the only animals that are sentient beings?

I'm sure that's a comfort to all of the other animals suffering ill treatment trying to find the best way to avoid it. 

[VincentRJ]

55 minutes ago, mauGR1 said:

Lol, who is being silly ?

Read again your own post, you are contradicting yourself in the short space of 3 lines.

Not at all. Dreaming is not considered as consciousness or awareness of reality, and Buddhist meditation usually involves a focus of attention on something like a candle or the sensation of one's breath on one's nostrils, as one consciously breathes.

[Sunmaster]

6 hours ago, VincentRJ said:

Not at all. Dreaming is not considered as consciousness or awareness of reality, and Buddhist meditation usually involves a focus of attention on something like a candle or the sensation of one's breath on one's nostrils, as one consciously breathes.

When it comes to dreamlessness, conventional wisdom states that consciousness disappears when we fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. 

But researchers have come up with a new way to define the different ways that we experience dreamlessness, and say there’s no evidence to suggest that our consciousness 'switches off' when we stop dreaming. In fact, they say the state of dreamlessness is way more complicated than we’d even imagined.

 

"[T]he idea that dreamless sleep is an unconscious state is not well-supported by the evidence," one of the researchers, Evan Thompson from the University of British Columbia in Canada, told Live Science.

Instead, he says the evidence points to the possibility of people having conscious experiences during all states of sleep - including deep sleep - and that could have implications for those accused of committing a crime while sleepwalking.

Taken from:
https://www.sciencealert.com/your-consciousness-does-not-switch-off-during-a-dreamless-sleep-say-scientists

[VincentRJ]

5 minutes ago, canuckamuck said:

There is a lot more going on in a hydrogen atom than that. There are complex forces at play. There are quarks and leptons and bosons, and their various charges and forces. Some of the bosons are still undiscovered.

I wonder where they came from and why they work so well and orderly?

Orderly? Where do you get that idea from? God? Even in a sold lump of iron, the trillions of atoms that comprise the iron are in constant movement or vibration. It's theoretically possible that an object you drop will not immediately fall to the floor because so many of the atoms are temporarily aligned to resist the force of gravity. Perhaps one chance in a trillion, trillion, though. So don't expect to see it in your lifetime. ????

[mauGR1]

9 minutes ago, VincentRJ said:

Not at all. Dreaming is not considered as consciousness or awareness of reality, and Buddhist meditation usually involves a focus of attention on something like a candle or the sensation of one's breath on one's nostrils, as one consciously breathes.

Stop digging, you are conscious when you are dreaming, you are conscious when you focus your attention on anything, and i suggest you trying to involve your thought consciousness when you try to discuss things which obviously are not so familiar to your daily life.

[canuckamuck]

3 minutes ago, VincentRJ said:

Orderly? Where do you get that idea from? God? Even in a sold lump of iron, the trillions of atoms that comprise the iron are in constant movement or vibration. It's theoretically possible that an object you drop will not immediately fall to the floor because so many of the atoms are temporarily aligned to resist the force of gravity. Perhaps one chance in a trillion, trillion, though. So don't expect to see it in your lifetime. ????

For you things have to stop moving to be orderly then? Those atoms are behaving in predictable ways and can be forced to behave differently in predictable ways. That is order. Otherwise iron would be useless.

Edited November 27, 2019 by canuckamuck

[VincentRJ]

11 minutes ago, Sunmaster said:

When it comes to dreamlessness, conventional wisdom states that consciousness disappears when we fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. 

But researchers have come up with a new way to define the different ways that we experience dreamlessness, and say there’s no evidence to suggest that our consciousness 'switches off' when we stop dreaming. In fact, they say the state of dreamlessness is way more complicated than we’d even imagined.

 

"[T]he idea that dreamless sleep is an unconscious state is not well-supported by the evidence," one of the researchers, Evan Thompson from the University of British Columbia in Canada, told Live Science.

Instead, he says the evidence points to the possibility of people having conscious experiences during all states of sleep - including deep sleep - and that could have implications for those accused of committing a crime while sleepwalking.

Taken from:
https://www.sciencealert.com/your-consciousness-does-not-switch-off-during-a-dreamless-sleep-say-scientists

Interesting article, but here are other quotes from the article you should consider. A lot of science is still uncertain.

 

"This is not to claim that conscious mental activity continues throughout sleep. Whether periods of unconsciousness occur in sleep alongside dreaming and dreamless sleep experience is, in our view, an open empirical question.
 

The more pressing point is that, given the available evidence, it seems unlikely that all stages of sleep currently classed as dreamless necessarily or consistently involve a loss of phenomenal consciousness."
Dreams and dreamlessness are incredibly difficult things for researchers to study and define. We still don't know why we dream, if dreams have meaning, and why some of us struggle to remember any of them."

[VincentRJ]

11 minutes ago, canuckamuck said:

For you things have to stop moving to be orderly then? Those atoms are behaving in predictable ways and can be forced to behave differently in predictable ways. That is order. Otherwise iron would be useless.

No. There's nothing predictable about the movement of individual atoms within a lump of matter. It's all random movement in all directions. When the matter is more fluid, like a soupy sea, or the atmosphere, the movement and collisions of atoms and molecules are much greater, and definitely unpredictable.

[canuckamuck]

1 minute ago, VincentRJ said:

No. There's nothing predictable about the movement of individual atoms within a lump of matter. It's all random movement in all directions. When the matter is more fluid, like a soupy sea, or the atmosphere, the movement and collisions of atoms and molecules are much greater, and definitely unpredictable.

Yes I know how it works. This is getting silly. The atoms still have predictable qualities which makes iron useful.

[Sunmaster]

They are scientists. They need to cover their backsides when they come up with researches that go against the status quo.
There's still a lot that science can't explain, so why anyone would put so much faith in it, especially when it comes to the big questions about life, seems very odd to me.

Did you watch the speech of the neuroscientist who had a stroke? What do you think about that?

[Elad]

On 11/25/2019 at 2:56 AM, Sunmaster said:

Having actually had such an experience, I can tell you that science alone has very superficial and downright erroneous explanations for it. I was an atheist before, so had no spiritual preconception of what had happened to me. Of course I tried to make sense of it by doing my own research and I can candidly tell you that science came up short, very short.
There are however, tons of other sources of knowledge that don't fit in the tight parameters of science, but surprise surprise, they offered the best explanations. How did they do something that science was not capable of doing? Easy, they have 1000s of years of practice under their belts. What I have experienced, had already been experienced by countless others who have laid out maps for those who came after them. I mean, what would you do? Insist on relying on science which explains nothing, or start to consider other sources who actually know what they're talking about? The answer is really obvious of course, unless you don't really care about finding answers.

No source (science, meditation or whatever you do) will provide any answers as to whether an intelligent design to the universe exists or not. That's because ultimately, religion/faith/spiritual experiences provide zero evidence to support an intelligent design,  and conversely, science provides zero evidence that intelligent design is non-existent.

 

So basically with no evidence either way for the existence or non-existence of intelligent design we can say that the two statements below each have a probability of 0.5 (50%) and one of them must be correct.

 

1.  A universe with intelligent design   
2.  A universe without intelligent design 

Only one of the above can be true, both can't be true and non of them can't be true because we exist and are part of a universe, it either has intelligent design or it doesn't. 

Although I will always back No 2, I also accept that based on the evidence (no evidence) that No 1 is still a possibility.

This is due to the fact that science only tries to describe around 5% of the universe (baryonic matter/energy) and 95% of the universe (dark matter/energy) we know nothing about, and of the 5% we know about, we still don't fully understand it.

 

I would like to question the believers on here such as Sunmaster, mauGR1, TBL, canuckamuck and others;

Since there's no evidence either way, do you accept that there's a 50% probability that No 2 is correct, a universe without a creator? 

[sirineou]

10 minutes ago, Elad said:

No source (science, meditation or whatever you do) will provide any answers as to whether an intelligent design to the universe exists or not. That's because ultimately, religion/faith/spiritual experiences provide zero evidence to support an intelligent design,  and conversely, science provides zero evidence that intelligent design is non-existent

One can no more prove that god does not exist than to prove that Unicorns or leprechaun do not exist.

So i guess then we need to give the same weight to god's existence as we can to Unicorns or leprechaun  

"One simply cannot prove a negative and general claim.

It is possible to prove rather specific negative claims that are made with rather well defined limits. "

http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/phil_of_religion_text/CHAPTER_5_ARGUMENTS_EXPERIENCE/Burden-of-Proof.htm

 

[Danielcc]

call me "cultural catholic".

[sirineou]

8 hours ago, canuckamuck said:

There is a lot more going on in a hydrogen atom than that. There are complex forces at play. There are quarks and leptons and bosons, and their various charges and forces. Some of the bosons are still undiscovered.

I wonder where they came from and why they work so well and orderly?

What you are describing is called the Anthropic principle.

Is everything so well and orderly so we can be here? or are we here because everything is in such order?

The short and easy to understand video below explains the principle much better than i could with in the confines of a short reply.Less than two minutes long.

 

[canuckamuck]

26 minutes ago, sirineou said:

What you are describing is called the Anthropic principle.

Is everything so well and orderly so we can be here? or are we here because everything is in such order?

The short and easy to understand video below explains the principle much better than i could with in the confines of a short reply.Less than two minutes long.

 

Well thanks for that, I enjoyed it.

However, whenever we see the multiverse being added to the discussion of how we can exist despite the improbability of our existence, it takes us back to Vincent RJ's scrambling about the start of life from life. He is depending on infinite do-overs until life is created. However the multiverse guys like to have infinite do-overs in a an infinite amount of universes. All of this because no amount of improbability to is too much when one is trying to disprove creation.

The amount of faith it requires to believe there is no creator, is staggering. 

[canuckamuck]

1 hour ago, Elad said:

No source (science, meditation or whatever you do) will provide any answers as to whether an intelligent design to the universe exists or not. That's because ultimately, religion/faith/spiritual experiences provide zero evidence to support an intelligent design,  and conversely, science provides zero evidence that intelligent design is non-existent.

 

So basically with no evidence either way for the existence or non-existence of intelligent design we can say that the two statements below each have a probability of 0.5 (50%) and one of them must be correct.

 

1.  A universe with intelligent design   
2.  A universe without intelligent design 

Only one of the above can be true, both can't be true and non of them can't be true because we exist and are part of a universe, it either has intelligent design or it doesn't. 

Although I will always back No 2, I also accept that based on the evidence (no evidence) that No 1 is still a possibility.

This is due to the fact that science only tries to describe around 5% of the universe (baryonic matter/energy) and 95% of the universe (dark matter/energy) we know nothing about, and of the 5% we know about, we still don't fully understand it.

 

I would like to question the believers on here such as Sunmaster, mauGR1, TBL, canuckamuck and others;

Since there's no evidence either way, do you accept that there's a 50% probability that No 2 is correct, a universe without a creator? 

I certainly consider my position when having the discussion, but I am not anywhere close to a 50/50 position. The preponderance of my experiential evidence gives me confidence of intelligent design. There is nothing about the, random chance life has no meaning scenario, that gives me any confidence. It is a security blanket for those that need the universe to be impersonal and their experience in it self-controlled.

Edited November 28, 2019 by canuckamuck

[VincentRJ]

9 hours ago, Sunmaster said:

They are scientists. They need to cover their backsides when they come up with researches that go against the status quo.
There's still a lot that science can't explain, so why anyone would put so much faith in it, especially when it comes to the big questions about life, seems very odd to me.
 

That's a very relevant point. Why does anyone put so much faith in science? I think I can answer this for you.

 

First we should distinguish between the 'Methodology of Science', and the media-reported, so-called, 'consensus of opinion' on any scientific issue.

 

The Methodology of Science requires repeated experimentation under controlled conditions which have consistent results,  before we can understand certain processes, have confidence in the theory, and make accurate predictions.

 

A scientist will tend to have a faith in that 'methodology of science', which should also include attempts to falsify a particular theory. To the extent that scientists are honest and unbiased, they will admit to any uncertainties. Any competent scientist knows that science is full of uncertainties because there are so many situations where the full rigor of the 'Methodology of Science' cannot be applied, for various reasons, such as the time-scales involved being too long, or the complexity of interacting forces being too great, and so on.

 

However, most of the general public do not seem to understand this 'Methodology of Science' and/or appreciate its vital importance in the development of the technological products of science they benefit from, such as motor cars, TV sets, computers, airplanes, disease-curing drugs, and so on, which are often very reliable and successful, eventually, after many mistakes in their development.

 

The most glaring example of a 'faith in science', as opposed to a faith in the Methodology of Science, is the current belief among many, that human emissions of CO2 are the main cause or driver of the current change in climate, and that such changes in climate are bad, or will be bad. This belief is of the nature of a religion.

[Skeptic7]

4 minutes ago, canuckamuck said:

I certainly consider my position when having the discussion, but I am not anywhere close to a 50/50 position. The preponderance of my experiential evidence gives me confidence of intelligent design. There is nothing about the, random chance life has no meaning scenario, that gives me any confidence. It is a security blanket for those that need the universe to be impersonal and their experience in it self-controlled.

You've got the security blanky and who needs it backassward. 

[sirineou]

2 minutes ago, canuckamuck said:

The amount of faith it requires to believe there is no creator, is staggering.

It all depends what you mean by "Creator"

If by creator you mean a biblical creator who created as in his own image , and created the universe for as , it would be staggering to believe that he created something so big , most of it hostile to as and out of reach, for something as small as as.

We Live on a small planet in an insignificant solar system in a small galaxy that contains about 50 billion suns, in a universe that contains  about one hundred billion galaxies. And god made all these for as. 

   If by creator you mean some creative force, ofcourse , How else?

Is that creative force god, and aware of as? I guess as much as we are gods to a cell in our body  and aware of it.  

[mauGR1]

2 hours ago, Elad said:

I would like to question the believers on here such as Sunmaster, mauGR1, TBL, canuckamuck and others;

Since there's no evidence either way, do you accept that there's a 50% probability that No 2 is correct, a universe without a creator? 

Thanks for your honesty, i knew there are some honest atheists out there ????

From a materialistic point of view, i find your reasoning correct.

Yet, even from a materialistic point of view, we are different from animals, our consciousness is individual.

I cannot speak for others, but in my experience, if you give "the spirit" a chance of existing, and you put aside any prejudice, the existence of "the spirit", or "god", or "intelligent design" if you prefer, will become obvious.

I don't even need "faith" to say that, but just the awareness of the fact that the 5 physical senses are the doors of perception of the physical world, but the "conscious thought" is directly related and connected with countless spiritual worlds.

 

 

[canuckamuck]

50 minutes ago, Skeptic7 said:

You've got the security blanky and who needs it backassward. 

I am glad you are staying with us in this debate. Don't be afraid to share how you really feel.