Are you an Atheist/Believer?

[Neeranam]

Again, people asking for evidence for the existence of a higher power...

Be honest, you wouldn't believe the evidence if it were right in front of you (which it is), or inside of you (which it is).

When I list the ways to obtain such evidence (meditation, psychedelic substances if you're into that thing, or even just being in the presence of an enlightened person), I don't get any replies from the atheist lot.

Why?

Because it's just easier to beat around the bush with intellectual arguments that take you nowhere, than actually get off your ass and DO something that takes an effort and could change your whole worldview.

I'm not here to convert anybody. I don't follow any religion. I find it sad however that people choose to stay in the dark out of fear or laziness and never get to know their true self.

And with this I sign out. I will follow this thread but will try hard not to reply.

all the best

It is very sad and you said it - fear is the only thing stopping them and fear is all in the mind.

I have met a few enlightened folks and agree that in their presence I felt something very special. They included top Buddhist Lamas(inc. HH the Dalai Lama), Hindu gurus general meditation experts.

Strangely, I felt the same thing when I met Uri Geller, who is famous for bending spoons. I found out recently that he was used to find Saddam Hussain a few years ago. I met him on a TV show where I was hypnotically regressed (not by Uri)to a previous life.

Can an atheist believe in re-incarnation as there is proof of that?

Edited January 6, 2014 by Neeranam

[sirineou]

Shamans used psychotropic plants and concoctions to look behind the veil, but there are other ways also. Sometimes a very strong trauma, a near death experience, meditation of course and yes, psychedelic substances can open the doors of perception.

Being off your nut can certainly alter your perception of reality.

I did a bunch of psychedelics and saw God one time. I have always operated under the assumption that it was a hallucination, but I did gain - what I think were - some valuable insights fron the experience.

Valuable insights, like dont do them again? they could cause serious brain damage causing you to become a republican later in life?

[anon8]

You did say I would be overwhelmed by your evidence and I am sorry to say that it did not occur.

Scientific dating methods also have no bearing on whether or not there is a God. Scientists have many versions of radeologic dating. They have many because they get different results with different methods, so are keen to use the method that is likely to provide the answer they prefer.

I may not have convinced you, but the evidence that there is no god is overwhelming. You may not accept that, but most rational minds would and do.

Carbon dating is very precise. You say scientists can come up with a number they prefer. But that is precisely what science does not do, scientific theories have been proven over and over, they are no longer theories, they have become scientific facts. The results of dating techniques are repeatable, they are not some random numbers, made up just to annoy religeous people. That is why it is called science, not fiction. You may choose to ignore this if course.

There are christians who believe Earth is 6000 years old. No amount of scientific evidence will ever change their beliefs.

I onced watched a funny debate, a christian man was arguing how Earth is 6000 years old, and men walked the Earth same time as dinosaurs. Opponent was making a point that dino bones have been proven to be much older than 6000 years, christian mans responce was: god put these bones to trick us LOL

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[notmyself]

I may not have convinced you, but the evidence that there is no god is overwhelming.

Such as?

[Neeranam]

You did say I would be overwhelmed by your evidence and I am sorry to say that it did not occur.

Scientific dating methods also have no bearing on whether or not there is a God. Scientists have many versions of radeologic dating. They have many because they get different results with different methods, so are keen to use the method that is likely to provide the answer they prefer.

I may not have convinced you, but the evidence that there is no god is overwhelming. You may not accept that, but most rational minds would and do.

Carbon dating is very precise. You say scientists can come up with a number they prefer. But that is precisely what science does not do, scientific theories have been proven over and over, they are no longer theories, they have become scientific facts. The results of dating techniques are repeatable, they are not some random numbers, made up just to annoy religeous people. That is why it is called science, not fiction. You may choose to ignore this if course.

There are christians who believe Earth is 6000 years old. No amount of scientific evidence will ever change their beliefs.

I onced watched a funny debate, a christian man was arguing how Earth is 6000 years old, and men walked the Earth same time as dinosaurs. Opponent was making a point that dino bones have been proven to be much older than 6000 years, christian mans responce was: god put these bones to trick us LOL

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What evidence that there is no God?

[thailiketoo]

What evidence that there is no God?

What evidence that there is no Easter Bunny?

[anon8]

It is very sad and you said it - fear is the only thing stopping them and fear is all in the mind.

I have met a few enlightened folks and agree that in their presence I felt something very special. They included top Buddhist Lamas(inc. HH the Dalai Lama), Hindu gurus general meditation experts.

Strangely, I felt the same thing when I met Uri Geller, who is famous for bending spoons. I found out recently that he was used to find Saddam Hussain a few years ago. I met him on a TV show where I was hypnotically regressed (not by Uri)to a previous life.

Can an atheist believe in re-incarnation as there is proof of that?

Uri Geller is a fraud.

Watch this classic clip, Johnny Carson Show,

Most have prolly seen it, if not, watch it, it is quite amusing:

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[notmyself]

What evidence that there is no God?

What evidence that there is no Easter Bunny?

Or a 12' invisible elephant called Colin living in my shed. The list is endless.

[Neeranam]

What evidence that there is no God?

What evidence that there is no Easter Bunny?

I know of no evidence saying there isn't.

Most of the atheists I have known were either alcoholics, heroin addicts or sex-addicts. Interesting, as maybe they loved their drug of choice so much they refused to believe any evidence on the existence of God for fear they would lose it. Ex-addicts, however look on the God thing very differently. Would be interesting t see how many atheists lived in Pattaya!

[notmyself]

Most of the atheists I have known were either alcoholics, heroin addicts or sex-addicts.

Anecdotal evidence.... You should perhaps get out more.

[thailiketoo]

What evidence that there is no God?

What evidence that there is no Easter Bunny?

I know of no evidence saying there isn't.

Most of the atheists I have known were either alcoholics, heroin addicts or sex-addicts. Interesting, as maybe they loved their drug of choice so much they refused to believe any evidence on the existence of God for fear they would lose it. Ex-addicts, however look on the God thing very differently. Would be interesting t see how many atheists lived in Pattaya!

1. alcoholics, 2. heroin addicts or 3. sex-addicts. 4. how many atheists lived in Pattaya!

You have secured a place for yourself on the

The Eight-Fold Path of TV-Humiliation (Hall of Fame version)

But you should really be ashamed of yourself. The Easter Bunny would not approve.

Edited January 6, 2014 by thailiketoo

[pastafarian]

What evidence that there is no God?

What evidence that there is no Easter Bunny?

I know of no evidence saying there isn't.

Most of the atheists I have known were either alcoholics, heroin addicts or sex-addicts. Interesting, as maybe they loved their drug of choice so much they refused to believe any evidence on the existence of God for fear they would lose it. Ex-addicts, however look on the God thing very differently. Would be interesting t see how many atheists lived in Pattaya!

Wow! A recent study actually showed atheists have a higher IQ than religious people, indeed many of the most brilliant minds in history have been atheist, see pic below. And another study of prison populations in America and Canada showed a much lower proportion of atheists as inmates (in relation to the overall population of each country) than religious people. People often try and claim atheists are without morals and dine on babies but the reality is we can be good without god!

[thailiketoo]

Most of the atheists I have known were either alcoholics, heroin addicts or sex-addicts.

Anecdotal evidence.... You should perhaps get out more.

And here I thought Bob Dylan was Jewish.

[anon8]

I know of no evidence saying there isn't.

Most of the atheists I have known were either alcoholics, heroin addicts or sex-addicts. Interesting, as maybe they loved their drug of choice so much they refused to believe any evidence on the existence of God for fear they would lose it. Ex-addicts, however look on the God thing very differently. Would be interesting t see how many atheists lived in Pattaya!

Not nice!

[wolf5370]

I've heard and read Dawkins wrt his atheist belief's and it seems to me all his arguments are against religion rather than God. A lot of people have a real problem separating the two (on both side of the camp). Religion is created by man, and all those book were written by people. According to Judo-Christian beliefs at least, God has only written two things down personally - the Ten Commandments (twice after Moses busted the first set) and on Belshazzar's wall ("Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin") - neither of course survives to today if ever they existed.

It is easy to take these early thoughts of mankind trying to find answers, that they attributed to God, or Gods, direct intervention, and poo-poo it with scientific understanding today. However, there is more not understood today than there was back then - the more we know, the more we realise we do not know. There are also many assumptions made that we "know" exist because our calculations and the things we understand to be true and correct would not work without them - take Dark Matter and Dark Energy for example. Einstein poo-pooed the concept of aether (also spelled ether), a concept understood to be correct as it "must" exist for the science of the day to work - such as light travelling through a vacuum or gravity push/pull against. It took quite a while for the aether theory to disappear from main stream science (ignored as rubbish by some very eminent scientists too).

God can no so easily be disproved, only the short sightedness and ignorance of the scripture writers and believers of those words - if we remove all the written scripture and gumph that accompanies it (i.e. religion) - then we are left with fundamental questions - which can be answered in terms of a "director" (or by whatever name/concept God is known to you - be it old man with long beard, the universe, a nine armed monkey, or whatever) at the point at which we reach back as far as we can with science.

The truth is, we can not go back to the start of the Big Bang at all - there was no "then" to go back to (according to science - as time was created at that point too) - so we simply can not possibly ever know for sure how the Big Bang happened at all - and there is no scientific explanation for it either, that does not get back to the same issue of whatever that explanation is (for example: One such suggestion is that the Universe contracts (for some reason) causing a singularity (i.e. the mass is so high that it collapses under its own gravity to become a singular 1D point in space-time with infinite mass and gravity) it then explodes as there is simply too much energy for it not too - and eventually it all slows down and begins to contract again (like a yoyo) - and it all starts again. This has the same problem as the old "It's turtles all the way down" story (attributed to many people) - it has to start somewhere/time - doesn't it???

One version of God could therefore be the initiator: Setting up all of physics in such a way that a planer could form around a sun at just the right distance, with just the right set of partners (like Jupiter to absorb millions of asteroids that could have ended us before we started - like the one that caused the moon to form - something else that is required btw), with just the right amount of iron, sulphur, nitrogen, oxygen and silicon to allow for the oceans to be formed and life to start (in a mere 500 million years rom the formation!) and change the atmosphere to allow for more advanced life, by way of sacrificing itself (cyanobacteria), with the right gravity coefficient to allow water to form and accumulate, the right temperature to allow atmosphere to form and water cycle to work without being blown off into space (like Mars'), and so on (the list of things is actually really quite staggering - and the narrow ranges that are required for many of these "settings" is miniscule!).

One thing we know from science is that things are very complex and co-dependent - further than that, are totally connected and combined - this is what allows us to have science in the first place, to arrange and calculate these "laws" - it is why we are still striving for a unified force (we can narrow it down to 2 with a bit of jiggery pokery- I am talking about the Weak force that is pretty much shoe-horned into Strongs and Electro-Magnetic forces "pocket" - leaving Gravity on it's tod). There is much that break our understanding, or we take as "red" without really knowing why - such as entwined particles, movement of plasma clouds, gravity itself, reverse time-travel (Einstein proved it is theoretically possible (all times co-exist as time is a concept only - its is just a part within the curvature of space-time and is a ever-present as "all places" are) - we all say it is science fiction - why? because there are no future holiday maker coming to visit us!), and many more. We give more "plausible" solutions, and often even just guesses (or "just because it does"/"we don't know"), to appease our modern thinking that science will and can answer all - but a person that believes in God (ignoring religion) will simply counter with - "and who or what created all that Science?".

Science is stuck with the same unanswerable, unprovable, conundrum as God - and thus there will always be believers and non-believers and neither can prove themselves right or the other wrong.

...and in all that I never answered the question - however, I don't intend to as Dawkin's question is about religion, or at best his interpretation of what he thinks we think God is, and therefore not relevant to my answer.

[sirineou]

I know of no evidence saying there isn't.

Most of the atheists I have known were either alcoholics, heroin addicts or sex-addicts. Interesting, as maybe they loved their drug of choice so much they refused to believe any evidence on the existence of God for fear they would lose it. Ex-addicts, however look on the God thing very differently. Would be interesting t see how many atheists lived in Pattaya!

We might not know how many Atheists live in Pattaya but we certainly know there are a lot of Christians there

[wolf5370]

Some of your choices were just things people said were caused by God (eg weather, and disease) Now we know that these things have natural causes. But we do not know anything more or less about God's existence because of them.

are you then saying that you are agnostic? since you " do not know anything more or less about God's existence because of them."

or do you believe in the"God of the gaps"? ,an increasingly shrinking domain residing in what we don't know yet.

Actually that wouold be "ever increasing gaps" as we know more questions to ask that we have no answers for than we once did - 5000BC it was "What is the sky?" "What is the sea?" "What are the stars/moon/sun?" etc - now it is "Why does there seem to be so much missing mass in the universe?" "Why do some particles have mass and others not?" "Where does Gravity get its energy from?" "How can entwined particles duplicate changes of spin over great distances instantly when the speed of light/infinite mass rule limits such communication?" and many, many, many more

The problem is that most people know a little about science - and they happily believe every scientific "fact" that comes to be known as true. This has the effect that most people seem to believe that we know almost everything now - but the truth is the opposite. Scientific process has lead us to ask deeper and deeper questions - and as we guess, and then try to prove that guess, and hopefully eventually do, it just uncovers the next layer of questions - and it is almost always a pyramidic decent (more questions the deeper we go). It took a long time to show any evidence of the Higgs Field which we needed for quite a lot of theories with respect to quarks, particles symmetry and mas, and so on - in 2012 the Higgs Boson (yep the God particle - thought it was apt ) being finally discovered put to bed many of those questions - but opened the door for the next layer. For example - when quarks were first postulated it was thought there were few of them - then as we discovered properties in the quarks, we found there were more - now there are hundreds - this is against the simplified model theory - that is, that as we learn more, we move towards fewer fundamental parts (such as elements) - but we end up with more particles than we can deal with and no evident sub-quark layer to account for all the types. A major upset - and still confusing scenario that is already being addressed by theorists. That crack gets ever more wider.

[wolf5370]

Some have stated that they can not believe that atheist get so worked up about something they do not believe exists.

What reasonable people get so worked up about is that something that does not exist has cause so much pain, suffering, suppression and death over the past 2000 years!

Remember the Inquisition?

Remember the Crusades?

A Pope who sent Missionaries to the "New World" with instructions to " kill whoever you can not convert"

and the list goes on and on.

Reasonable people ( atheist if you like) get worked up by the tragic things caused by superstitious people who believe in what does not exist.

This is true - but it would still have happened without religion. There are always differences and those differences are what causes (or allows ambitious people to take advantage of) that suffering. As with religion, wars will still be fought over skin colour, language, political beliefs (look at Thailand right now!), and so on. Its all about the people at the top juxtapositioning and trying to get a larger wedge of the cheese - religion et al are just excuses and excuses will always be found.

Having said that, I always found religion to be most ungodly in its action and theology with respect to other religions.

[BookMan]

What evidence that there is no God?

What evidence that there is no Easter Bunny?

I know of no evidence saying there isn't.

Most of the atheists I have known were either alcoholics, heroin addicts or sex-addicts. Interesting, as maybe they loved their drug of choice so much they refused to believe any evidence on the existence of God for fear they would lose it. Ex-addicts, however look on the God thing very differently. Would be interesting t see how many atheists lived in Pattaya!

I don't doubt that was the case for you Neeranam, but more likely a result of the types of people who you associate with.

My experience could not have been further from yours in regards to atheists I know.

Edited January 6, 2014 by BookMan

[Shancloudy]

God bless us all. Good night everyone

Edited January 6, 2014 by Shancloudy

[sirineou]

Some of your choices were just things people said were caused by God (eg weather, and disease) Now we know that these things have natural causes. But we do not know anything more or less about God's existence because of them.

are you then saying that you are agnostic? since you " do not know anything more or less about God's existence because of them."

or do you believe in the"God of the gaps"? ,an increasingly shrinking domain residing in what we don't know yet.

Actually that wouold be "ever increasing gaps" as we know more questions to ask that we have no answers for than we once did - 5000BC it was "What is the sky?" "What is the sea?" "What are the stars/moon/sun?" etc - now it is "Why does there seem to be so much missing mass in the universe?" "Why do some particles have mass and others not?" "Where does Gravity get its energy from?" "How can entwined particles duplicate changes of spin over great distances instantly when the speed of light/infinite mass rule limits such communication?" and many, many, many more

The problem is that most people know a little about science - and they happily believe every scientific "fact" that comes to be known as true. This has the effect that most people seem to believe that we know almost everything now - but the truth is the opposite. Scientific process has lead us to ask deeper and deeper questions - and as we guess, and then try to prove that guess, and hopefully eventually do, it just uncovers the next layer of questions - and it is almost always a pyramidic decent (more questions the deeper we go). It took a long time to show any evidence of the Higgs Field which we needed for quite a lot of theories with respect to quarks, particles symmetry and mas, and so on - in 2012 the Higgs Boson (yep the God particle - thought it was apt ) being finally discovered put to bed many of those questions - but opened the door for the next layer. For example - when quarks were first postulated it was thought there were few of them - then as we discovered properties in the quarks, we found there were more - now there are hundreds - this is against the simplified model theory - that is, that as we learn more, we move towards fewer fundamental parts (such as elements) - but we end up with more particles than we can deal with and no evident sub-quark layer to account for all the types. A major upset - and still confusing scenario that is already being addressed by theorists. That crack gets ever more wider.

whether the gap between what we know and what we don't know is increasing, remains the same or is decreasing, is arguable and a subject for an other debate, what ever the gap was ,we were able to explain it with science in the past, now there are new gaps, but what ever the size of this new gap is it does not men that we need to fill it with magic, haven't we learned anything from the past?.

As far as the Highs Boson is concerned the coinage of the term "the god particle" is not apt at all and is not used by any credible scientists,

The story behind the name explained by a CERN spokesman:

"the real story behind this extremely unfortunate name "God Particle." As some of you may know, The God Particle is the title of a popular science book by Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman, who was Fermilab's director for many years and thus my boss when I was a postdoctoral fellow there. According to Leon, he wanted to call the book The Goddamn Particlebecause nobody could find the thing. However, his editor discouraged him from the title, suggesting that The God Particle would sell many more copies. This is the story that Leon tells us."

Edited January 6, 2014 by sirineou

[notmyself]

One version of God could therefore be the initiator: Setting up all of physics in such a way that a planer could form around a sun at just the right distance, with just the right set of partners (like Jupiter to absorb millions of asteroids that could have ended us before we started - like the one that caused the moon to form - something else that is required btw), with just the right amount of iron, sulphur, nitrogen, oxygen and silicon to allow for the oceans to be formed and life to start (in a mere 500 million years rom the formation!) and change the atmosphere to allow for more advanced life, by way of sacrificing itself (cyanobacteria), with the right gravity coefficient to allow water to form and accumulate, the right temperature to allow atmosphere to form and water cycle to work without being blown off into space (like Mars'), and so on (the list of things is actually really quite staggering - and the narrow ranges that are required for many of these "settings" is miniscule!).

In astrophysics and cosmology, the anthropic principle (from Greek anthropos, meaning "human") is the philosophical consideration that observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it. Some proponents of the anthropic principle reason that it explains why the Universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate conscious life. As a result, they believe it is unremarkable that the universe's fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life.[1]

The strong anthropic principle (SAP) as explained by Barrow and Tipler (see variants) states that this is all the case because the Universe is compelled, in some sense, for conscious life to eventually emerge. Critics of the SAP argue in favor of a weak anthropic principle (WAP) similar to the one defined by Brandon Carter, which states that the universe's ostensible fine tuning is the result of selection bias: i.e., only in a universe capable of eventually supporting life will there be living beings capable of observing any such fine tuning, while a universe less compatible with life will go unbeheld.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

Science is stuck with the same unanswerable, unprovable, conundrum as God - and thus there will always be believers and non-believers and neither can prove themselves right or the other wrong.

(Phys.org) -- At the heart of quantum mechanics lies the wave function, a probability function used by physicists to understand the nanoscale world. Using the wave function, physicists can calculate a system's future behavior, but only with a certain probability. This inherently probabilistic nature of quantum theory differs from the certainty with which scientists can describe the classical world, leading to a nearly century-long debate on how to interpret the wave function: does it representative objective reality or merely the subjective knowledge of an observer?

Much more here

Kants I think versus Descartes I am a thing that thinks

With one exception, all references to Descartes in Kants Critique of Pure Reason

occur in the Transcendental Dialectic. After having laid out in the transcendental

Aesthetic and Analytic what he takes to be the legitimate use of our understanding and

reason, namely that use that remains within the boundaries of possible sensory

experience, in the Transcendental Dialectic Kant goes on to denounce the illusions of a metaphysical thinking that ignores those limits. His (mostly unnamed) targets are the metaphysicians of Leibnizian inspiration (primarily Wolff and Baumgarten), whose

metaphysics text-books Kant used as material for his own lectures.

http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/2575/longuenesse1.pdf

We live in a Universe based on probability so in effect, questions such as 'is there' a god and 'is there no god' are intrinsically meaningless unless you include said probability.

[wolf5370]

What for thousands of years the faithful attributed to the supernatural such as the wrath of God, earthquakes, lighting strikes; draught; extreme weather, plague, have been explained by science.

The work of Satan, deformed births, two headed sheep, plague, all explained by science.

demonic possession/ witches", epilepsy, hysteria, catatonic states, have been shown by mans scientific awakening to be natural, explainable, even reproducible/ repeatable events, & processes.

Radiologic dating, consistency of fossil species evidence within geologic strata, which meet stringent scientific criteria , provide overwhelming evidence of Old Earth and Evolution, rendering Creationism and Young Earth fables just that...unsupportable mumbo jumbo, with no scientific basis.

Huge advances in medicine, showing black plague, cholera were not work of satan.

Uncurable diseases, widely believed prayer will cure, but never did, now treatable, thanks to advances in science.

Now its your turn, canuckamuck! Please show me evidence there is god, a single peace of evidence, please!

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This is a fairly standard argument - but it is not an argument against or evidence that there is no God. It is simply a list of things certain religious people got wrong.

Someone that believes in God could simply say, in answer to your question - "the evidence of God is all around you, including all those things that you listed that science achieved". It is an unwinnable and unlosable argument because science can not answer the fundamental question, "how all this energy/matter/etc came into being and why?" and God can not be proved to exist. Lame answers about the Big Bang are just so, not because the theory is lame, but because the singularity that was behind the BB had that energy in existence (from where?) and as time did not yet exist, what made it go bang? (no such question can be irrefutably answered as it is impossible to get back to the instant of the BB as there was no time or matter in existence).

Simply put there is no evidence, even underwhelming evidence, that God does not exist- there cannot be due to the nature of the concept and the inanswerability of many fundamental questions that would require an answer for such proof. And unless God was to turn up one day in person, there is no incontrovertible evidence of His existence either. The religious will call this faith - to believe in something more than yourself without such incontrovertible proof - if such was forthcoming, there would be no faith. The only evidence is that religions have been wrong - Buddha was once asked about the creation, he told the questioner to ask a scientist (scholar of nature) about such things and ask him about the way to reach enlightenment - seems to me many religions since should have followed his advice in this regard.

[wolf5370]

Actually that wouold be "ever increasing gaps" as we know more questions to ask that we have no answers for than we once did - 5000BC it was "What is the sky?" "What is the sea?" "What are the stars/moon/sun?" etc - now it is "Why does there seem to be so much missing mass in the universe?" "Why do some particles have mass and others not?" "Where does Gravity get its energy from?" "How can entwined particles duplicate changes of spin over great distances instantly when the speed of light/infinite mass rule limits such communication?" and many, many, many more

The problem is that most people know a little about science - and they happily believe every scientific "fact" that comes to be known as true. This has the effect that most people seem to believe that we know almost everything now - but the truth is the opposite. Scientific process has lead us to ask deeper and deeper questions - and as we guess, and then try to prove that guess, and hopefully eventually do, it just uncovers the next layer of questions - and it is almost always a pyramidic decent (more questions the deeper we go). It took a long time to show any evidence of the Higgs Field which we needed for quite a lot of theories with respect to quarks, particles symmetry and mas, and so on - in 2012 the Higgs Boson (yep the God particle - thought it was apt ) being finally discovered put to bed many of those questions - but opened the door for the next layer. For example - when quarks were first postulated it was thought there were few of them - then as we discovered properties in the quarks, we found there were more - now there are hundreds - this is against the simplified model theory - that is, that as we learn more, we move towards fewer fundamental parts (such as elements) - but we end up with more particles than we can deal with and no evident sub-quark layer to account for all the types. A major upset - and still confusing scenario that is already being addressed by theorists. That crack gets ever more wider.

whether the gap between what we know and what we don't know is increasing, remains the same or is decreasing, is arguable and a subject for an other debate, what ever the gap was ,we were able to explain it with science in the past, now there are new gaps, but what ever the size of this new gap is it does not men that we need to fill it with magic, haven't we learned anything from the past?.

As far as the Highs Boson is concerned the coinage of the term "the god particle" is not apt at all and is not used by any credible scientists,

The story behind the name explained by a CERN spokesman:

"the real story behind this extremely unfortunate name "God Particle." As some of you may know, The God Particle is the title of a popular science book by Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman, who was Fermilab's director for many years and thus my boss when I was a postdoctoral fellow there. According to Leon, he wanted to call the book The Goddamn Particlebecause nobody could find the thing. However, his editor discouraged him from the title, suggesting that The God Particle would sell many more copies. This is the story that Leon tells us."

Sure we could argue about gap sizes (I am right though - but never mind).

The "God Particle" being "apt" was a quip - I wasn't meaning it in a religious way, just an ironic one given the thread - and indeed it is mostly media that name it such (although it was called that originally (coined) by Prof. Leon Lederman of Nobel fame back in the early 90s.

Ah yes, you said as much in the rest of your post. It was tongue in cheek in my post as much as it was by Lederman.

The concept of "filling the gaps with magic" as you so eloquently put it (I mean that, I liked the turn of phrase ) is an interesting one. I was actually not attempting to do so, and do believe that most educated believers would not either. However, the same could be said with respect to science at that point - what is magic? something that can not be explained with science - ahem, I think the gaps just filled themselves with magic - its un-magic-ing that science does in fact

A scientifically educated believer - and do not make the mistake of thinking scientists are all atheists I can tell you that is most inaccurate - would say that all the science is "God's magic" - and at the base level, magic is pretty much what it is. We explain things based on other things we understand, which were based on...etc. Our understanding of the universe is tiny in fact - we only surmise what is out there by what we can see and understand here - and the odd particle we capture hurtling through space - most of the universe is well out of our reach or vision - no matter what the telescope of method we use (unless Einstein was wrong with the infinite mass problem) by the time it reaches us we will be dead (time to get to the other side of the universe (boundary) at the speed of light is greater than the time the universe is expected to exist for - let alone getting back!). Truth is most of our theories are based on such little evidence that if it was a statistical analysis it would be dumped in the bin. We do what we can to understand based on this knowledge and our creativity, but we can never really know if we know everything, because we simply aren't everywhere to know it. There is no true foundation in our science other than "belief" and that "it works when we test it" - just like Newton's theories did, until Einstein, now even E=MC^2 has been rewritten as E=M^2C^4+P^2C^2 - theories are changed and what we know to be "true" is only really, "close to true, perhaps".

[anon8]

This is a fairly standard argument - but it is not an argument against or evidence that there is no God. It is simply a list of things certain religious people got wrong.

Simply put there is no evidence, even underwhelming evidence, that God does not exist

..

Yes, my arguments are fairly standard. But every single thing I listed was contributed to god or satan, before science came along, and gave an explanation.

You say there is no evidence that god does not exist.

Ok then! Where is he, what has he done? I asked in my post that you quoted, for believers to show some evidence that god exist. Nobody has come with anything yet. You say there is god, and it ends there. But this is child like belief there is Santa, because the child has been tought that there is Santa.

Following your logic, there is no evidence that there is no god. Ok! How do you prove thst Santa Clause does not really exist. I say there is overwhelming evidence that he doesnt exist. Should I list my reasons why I believe that?

Don't the faithful also have to have some burden of proof for their claims? I suppose they dont, faithfuls blindly believe. Atheist bring arguments to the table, faithful have nothing to offer.

I give up now.

It is hopeless to argue with group of people who believe in talking snake, magic underware.

It was fun talking about it until some guy came along with a claim all atheists he has met are heroin addicts LOL

[Nayet]

Many people I know seem to be proud that they are an atheist and that God is for the weak. IN my experience it is the other way around.

Simply, I think that religion is for those who don't want to go to Hell but spirituality is for those who have already been there.

With all due respect, your personal experience does not generalize and is thus completely irrelevant. "Spirituality" is an amorphous concept, and many atheists consider themselves to be spiritual. Furthermore, not all people who have been through hell become spiritual.

[notmyself]

Don't the faithful also have to have some burden of proof for their claims?

Of cause theist's do but not being able to come up with any leads to the ridiculous claim that atheism (which is by definition a rejection of theistic claims) is also a belief.

[sirineou]

Actually that wouold be "ever increasing gaps" as we know more questions to ask that we have no answers for than we once did - 5000BC it was "What is the sky?" "What is the sea?" "What are the stars/moon/sun?" etc - now it is "Why does there seem to be so much missing mass in the universe?" "Why do some particles have mass and others not?" "Where does Gravity get its energy from?" "How can entwined particles duplicate changes of spin over great distances instantly when the speed of light/infinite mass rule limits such communication?" and many, many, many more

The problem is that most people know a little about science - and they happily believe every scientific "fact" that comes to be known as true. This has the effect that most people seem to believe that we know almost everything now - but the truth is the opposite. Scientific process has lead us to ask deeper and deeper questions - and as we guess, and then try to prove that guess, and hopefully eventually do, it just uncovers the next layer of questions - and it is almost always a pyramidic decent (more questions the deeper we go). It took a long time to show any evidence of the Higgs Field which we needed for quite a lot of theories with respect to quarks, particles symmetry and mas, and so on - in 2012 the Higgs Boson (yep the God particle - thought it was apt ) being finally discovered put to bed many of those questions - but opened the door for the next layer. For example - when quarks were first postulated it was thought there were few of them - then as we discovered properties in the quarks, we found there were more - now there are hundreds - this is against the simplified model theory - that is, that as we learn more, we move towards fewer fundamental parts (such as elements) - but we end up with more particles than we can deal with and no evident sub-quark layer to account for all the types. A major upset - and still confusing scenario that is already being addressed by theorists. That crack gets ever more wider.

whether the gap between what we know and what we don't know is increasing, remains the same or is decreasing, is arguable and a subject for an other debate, what ever the gap was ,we were able to explain it with science in the past, now there are new gaps, but what ever the size of this new gap is it does not men that we need to fill it with magic, haven't we learned anything from the past?.

As far as the Highs Boson is concerned the coinage of the term "the god particle" is not apt at all and is not used by any credible scientists,

The story behind the name explained by a CERN spokesman:

"the real story behind this extremely unfortunate name "God Particle." As some of you may know, The God Particle is the title of a popular science book by Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman, who was Fermilab's director for many years and thus my boss when I was a postdoctoral fellow there. According to Leon, he wanted to call the book The Goddamn Particlebecause nobody could find the thing. However, his editor discouraged him from the title, suggesting that The God Particle would sell many more copies. This is the story that Leon tells us."

Sure we could argue about gap sizes (I am right though - but never mind).

The "God Particle" being "apt" was a quip - I wasn't meaning it in a religious way, just an ironic one given the thread - and indeed it is mostly media that name it such (although it was called that originally (coined) by Prof. Leon Lederman of Nobel fame back in the early 90s.

Ah yes, you said as much in the rest of your post. It was tongue in cheek in my post as much as it was by Lederman.

The concept of "filling the gaps with magic" as you so eloquently put it (I mean that, I liked the turn of phrase ) is an interesting one. I was actually not attempting to do so, and do believe that most educated believers would not either. However, the same could be said with respect to science at that point - what is magic? something that can not be explained with science - ahem, I think the gaps just filled themselves with magic - its un-magic-ing that science does in fact

A scientifically educated believer - and do not make the mistake of thinking scientists are all atheists I can tell you that is most inaccurate - would say that all the science is "God's magic" - and at the base level, magic is pretty much what it is. We explain things based on other things we understand, which were based on...etc. Our understanding of the universe is tiny in fact - we only surmise what is out there by what we can see and understand here - and the odd particle we capture hurtling through space - most of the universe is well out of our reach or vision - no matter what the telescope of method we use (unless Einstein was wrong with the infinite mass problem) by the time it reaches us we will be dead (time to get to the other side of the universe (boundary) at the speed of light is greater than the time the universe is expected to exist for - let alone getting back!). Truth is most of our theories are based on such little evidence that if it was a statistical analysis it would be dumped in the bin. We do what we can to understand based on this knowledge and our creativity, but we can never really know if we know everything, because we simply aren't everywhere to know it. There is no true foundation in our science other than "belief" and that "it works when we test it" - just like Newton's theories did, until Einstein, now even E=MC^2 has been rewritten as E=M^2C^4+P^2C^2 - theories are changed and what we know to be "true" is only really, "close to true, perhaps".

Thus are the limitations of communicating via a medium such as an internet forum,especially when it comes to a complicated subject such as this.

I apologize for any misunderstandings on my part.

No I don't make the mistake of thinking that all scientists are Atheists, in fact the tittle atheist is also an unfortunate one. No one can really be an atheist since it is impossible to prove a negative, The only negatives that can be disproved are the ones that are preceded by a limiting qualification , So you might be able to disprove that there is no God that makes the tides, but you cant disprove that there is no God .

But because scientists are not Atheists does not mean that they are theists , Let's not confuse Theism, with Deism

[wolf5370]

One version of God could therefore be the initiator: Setting up all of physics in such a way that a planer could form around a sun at just the right distance, with just the right set of partners (like Jupiter to absorb millions of asteroids that could have ended us before we started - like the one that caused the moon to form - something else that is required btw), with just the right amount of iron, sulphur, nitrogen, oxygen and silicon to allow for the oceans to be formed and life to start (in a mere 500 million years rom the formation!) and change the atmosphere to allow for more advanced life, by way of sacrificing itself (cyanobacteria), with the right gravity coefficient to allow water to form and accumulate, the right temperature to allow atmosphere to form and water cycle to work without being blown off into space (like Mars'), and so on (the list of things is actually really quite staggering - and the narrow ranges that are required for many of these "settings" is miniscule!).

In astrophysics and cosmology, the anthropic principle (from Greek anthropos, meaning "human") is the philosophical consideration that observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it. Some proponents of the anthropic principle reason that it explains why the Universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate conscious life. As a result, they believe it is unremarkable that the universe's fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life.[1]

The strong anthropic principle (SAP) as explained by Barrow and Tipler (see variants) states that this is all the case because the Universe is compelled, in some sense, for conscious life to eventually emerge. Critics of the SAP argue in favor of a weak anthropic principle (WAP) similar to the one defined by Brandon Carter, which states that the universe's ostensible fine tuning is the result of selection bias: i.e., only in a universe capable of eventually supporting life will there be living beings capable of observing any such fine tuning, while a universe less compatible with life will go unbeheld.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

Science is stuck with the same unanswerable, unprovable, conundrum as God - and thus there will always be believers and non-believers and neither can prove themselves right or the other wrong.

(Phys.org) -- At the heart of quantum mechanics lies the wave function, a probability function used by physicists to understand the nanoscale world. Using the wave function, physicists can calculate a system's future behavior, but only with a certain probability. This inherently probabilistic nature of quantum theory differs from the certainty with which scientists can describe the classical world, leading to a nearly century-long debate on how to interpret the wave function: does it representative objective reality or merely the subjective knowledge of an observer?

Much more here

Kants I think versus Descartes I am a thing that thinks

With one exception, all references to Descartes in Kants Critique of Pure Reason

occur in the Transcendental Dialectic. After having laid out in the transcendental

Aesthetic and Analytic what he takes to be the legitimate use of our understanding and

reason, namely that use that remains within the boundaries of possible sensory

experience, in the Transcendental Dialectic Kant goes on to denounce the illusions of a metaphysical thinking that ignores those limits. His (mostly unnamed) targets are the metaphysicians of Leibnizian inspiration (primarily Wolff and Baumgarten), whose

metaphysics text-books Kant used as material for his own lectures.

http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/2575/longuenesse1.pdf

We live in a Universe based on probability so in effect, questions such as 'is there' a god and 'is there no god' are intrinsically meaningless unless you include said probability.

Very colourful

Yes I am aware of the principles you state, I even considered adding that to my post - but thought it was long enough . The argument against WAP is simply that it requires either remarkable luck or an awful lot of trial and error to make such an environment - after all we ARE here, are we not? (ignoring Descartes for now )

The problem with the SAP argument is that it requires either a lack of understanding as to the impact of miss-aligned "settings" (as I referred to them), or the assumption that someone making such a statement suggests that all the "settings" had to be absolutes and exact. Neither is true really. We are not talking about, "could life exist if the world was 20 degrees hotter ?" or "If Gravity was 12ms-2 rather than 10...?" - we are talking about the differences such as the way water forms - two gasses that combine to make a liquid that has amazing properties such as surface tension, volume increasing when cooling but density decreasing (allowing ice to float), and so on. We are talking of the world being a smidge out or in, Jupiter not being there, gravity being different, the mass of Hydrogen being just so (and the amounts thereof) to allow for the formation of stars and planets in the first place. The formation of heavy metals (like iron) or heavy gases (i.e. gases other than hydrogen and helium) and so on. There simply is no possibility of life without those elements, or the existence of suns and planets - and so many other things that do not make small changes that life can get around, but that allow for an environment for it to exist in.

We live in a Universe based on probability so in effect, questions such as 'is there' a god and 'is there no god' are intrinsically meaningless unless you include said probability.

I agree - and Chaos theory (with Heisenberg and Schrodinger) takes away our ability to determine that as time go on (or even now - given super-states). The question may really be, "Does it matter if there is one or not?" or maybe even, "If there is a God, does it matter if I know it or believe it? Does a nematode living in the water at the bottom of a discarded flowerpot need to know or believe I exist regardless of the fact that I could make decision that could destroy its universe entirely?"

We already know scientifically that everything around us is energy, however "solid" it feels - depending on the theory of the day, it could be a series of open or closed strings (with or without 11 dimension - M-Theory), super gravity, quantum loops, etc. So, in effect all we have believed for our whole species existence has been wrong - up until now.

[anon8]

Don't the faithful also have to have some burden of proof for their claims?

Of cause theist's do but not being able to come up with any leads to the ridiculous claim that atheism (which is by definition a rejection of theistic claims) is also a belief.

So, you've got nothing!

Good night!