god does exist and he cheats at poker

So you are asserting that there is no middle ground between accepting something despite a lack of evidence and dismissing everything because of a lack of evidence?

If that were ever going to be plausible, I would support it wholeheartedly.

I look around me and see life as evidence of a creator as an absolute truth.

Misery and squalor is not typically associated with a benevolent creator but you're thinking and that's what's important

I don't blame my dad for what I have brought on myself or other men have, but this reasoning does not fit all the cases, but it will fit a lot of them.

Just because you can't measure or see something yourself doesn't mean it does not exist or that it is not possible. If I told you 100 years ago that certain animals exist that we are only just now discovering today, you'd look at me like I was a loon. Anything's possible, and science has been wrong many times before.

"Ice cream" is not spelled with a dash

How is science "proved wrong"?

And how is public opinion of 100 years ago matter to scientific community of today?

Pretty much this.

Scientific advancement is driven by human creativity and ambition. Many of the theories behind modern physics were devised before creating an experiment was possible. Essentially what I'm saying is that pure atheism - by the definition that you do simply do not believe in anything you cannot prove - would have seriously stunted the development of special relativity and quantum mechanics.

The fact that the most brilliant scientists in the world do not follow this philosophy should indicate something.

This proves nor indicates nothing. Many times in the world and in the present have large masses of people dedicated to a craft have followed a wrong idea.

I think mostly because a lot of religions, especially christianity and similar, have the belief that it is not simply good enough to believe, you also have to convert everyone around you.
Then there's jehoeva's witnesses that go door to door, badgering strangers.
With beleifs like that religion becomes very annoying, and hearing what some of the religious nuts (note: not saying their all nuts) have to say about religion makes it seem all the more ridiculous.

Also, as others have said, atheism is basically a religion too, and that contains the belief that all other religions are wrong and must be disproven (which btw, is standard practice for most religions)

And finally, as also has been addressed: because it's fun (btw, why the hell is that emoticon called neckbeard?)

Sigh. We're talking about Einstein and Feynman here, not Aristotle.

For me....probably "deism." I don't wholly reject the notion that God doesn't exist. But I have a hard time going along with the major religions. Their long history of suppressing scientific knowledge is probably the worst crime against humanity ever and it STILL continues today.

Let's reframe this whole science vs. religion thing.

First let's be explicit about what we mean by "science" in this context. Science isn't some monolithic body of dogma that proclaims "this is the way the world is, whether you like it or not." A scientific attitude says, "This is my best explanation for this phenomenon, but if you can poke a hole in it or show me a better one, I'm listening." That attitude has remarkably expanded what we know about the universe, with obvious technological benefits. This has resulted in a widely accepted set of explanations for things--why objects fall to earth, what causes Parkinson's, how the sun works, etc--that people can generally base their worldviews on without spending their lives recreating those explanations.

So, when it comes to "science vs. religion," what we mean by "science" is "a viewpoint informed by the scientific method and currently accepted scientific explanations for things."

That might seem like a long digression and a really wordy statement of the obvious. But the point is that "science" as described above does not claim that "God does not exist." That's not the kind of claim that science makes. The kind of claim that science does make is this: "According to what we currently understand about how things work, we don't need to postulate the existence of God to explain anything."


In fact, given what we know about how human minds work, we think we can explain why humans might want to postulate the existence of God. The human brain is, at its most basic, a pattern-finding machine. Its job is to take in information from nature, extract patterns from that, and make us better at staying alive by finding meaning in those patterns. This works at many levels, from very basic perception (distinguishing circles from lines) to solving abstract logic puzzles. It's the basis of science: looking for patterns in data and asking why they occur. It's the basis of our intelligence, and based on how we're doing as a species, I'd say we're very good at it.

The problem is that we're so good at finding patterns that we're not very good at not finding them. Even in an entirely random stream of data, we're capable of noticing patterns that crop up by chance. It's what happens when you look at a cloud and think it's almost in the shape of a camel. (It's also, I think, the basis of our appreciation of art, but that's a huge digression here.) Once we're found a pattern, we're wired to understand why that pattern exists, to take advantage of it. But, problem: if we've noticed a spurious pattern, there won't actually be an explanation for it. Nevertheless, our minds create one. It's the basis of superstition. Given enough of these patterns that we can't find repeatable explanations for, we're likely to determine that there must be mysterious forces out there that we don't understand. So, our basic cognitive processes give us a good reason to want to believe in something like a god, whether there is one or not.

All in all, then, science says: we don't need God to answer our questions, but we can explain why belief in God might exist. Neither of those those statements makes the claim "There is no God."

Strictly speaking, this is an agnostic viewpoint. The question of God's existence is neither relevant to its functioning nor something that it tries to answer. It's a tangential issue. While holding this viewpoint, I can be a theist and believe in God, or be an atheist and not believe in God. Contrary to Mort, I can also hold no opinion -- maybe I don't care, have never thought about it, or simply don't know where I stand. But that's no more reasonable a stance than being an agnostic atheist: an a.a. merely says "You can't prove it either way, but given that there's no reason to believe, I don't." Which was, I think Mort's original point.

Batman does exist.

Counterpoint:

Not everything. Just God.

Yay, another massassi religion thread!

We seem to be getting at least one of these a week.

Yay, another Onimusha post!

We seem to be getting at least three of these a day.

Superior counterpoint:

That is awesome.

Better then pointless religion debates. Cry about it?

As opposed to a pointless post in a religious thread. Cry about them?

Needs more penis.

actually compared to past religious threads this one is very civil, and actually pretty interesting... and it involves the existence of batman

Totally agreed Darth, these threads are getting better. Though the main points have been covered before, they're being covered with more articulation and less RARRR

RARRR!!!

Sugarless wins thread.

the letter A!

... is for ABORTION .

I didn't say science has been "proven wrong". IMO however, there are too many examples to list where science has been wrong, or has admitted they were wrong, or stepped back on what they said, etc. A simple google can turn up all the results you need.

Public opinion 100 years ago has nothing to do with the argument I was making. It's the principle that just because you can't see or measure something does not mean it does not exist, and that is a perfect example of a time where things which did exist (such as electricity at a time) were thought to be things only the Gods could possess, or were simply not possible and just figments of the imagination. 30 years ago half the stuff that is being invented now was called "nothing but science fiction". Yet, here we are.

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/94046.html



This.

That's... the point of science. To come up with explanations that can be proven wrong, and to use them until they are proven wrong.

As I said above, science doesn't say anything about God's existence. It just doesn't need God in any of its explanations. And using God as an explanation is non-scientific, because there's no way you can disprove it.



I don't know what you're referring to wrt. electricity, but there's a huge difference between things that we don't currently have the technology to do, and things that we'll never be able to do. The laws of physics never forbade human airflight (a technological issue), but they do tell us that you can't just speed up until you're going faster than light. Huge difference.

I challenge you to name something that, by its nature, you can't see or measure but which still exists. (Something non-religious, that is.)




Again, technology vs. theory.

Quarks cannot be observed (on their own) because of the nature of the strong force (it gets stronger the further the quarks are moved away). They still constitute all hadrons, though. We know they exist for slightly more complicated reasons that simply 'seeing' or 'measuring' them.

Before anyone mentions String Theory, even though strings themselves are well below the Planck scale (and therefore impossible to observe), recent developments in theory show that it does produce unique and testable topological symmetries, some of which may be within the limits of the LHC.

Science has been proved wrong.. by science. Never religion.

God dammit you people suck at this.

Atheism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive. Stole this from some guy's blog:




In other words, an agnostic atheist says, "I don't believe in god but I don't know if he exists or not." This is what people colloquially refer to as "agnostic." A gnostic atheist says that "I don't believe in god and I know he doesn't exist." This is what people often call "atheist" or "strong atheist." Gnostic atheists disbelieve in god the way most people (gnostic theists) believe in god. That is, they have faith that god does not exist.

Mort, you're being way too literal about what I meant by "see or measure." The way you "see or measure" anything postulated by a scientific theory is to test the predictions that theory makes. We both know that.

Ok, I'll concede to that.



Er, that little diagram, while visually pleasing, is a vast simplification and in many ways is just downright wrong. As I've already discussed, 'atheism' and 'agnosticism' simply discuss entirely different questions. One is theological, one is epistemological. Neither question is trivial nor easy to answer, though.

Gnosticism, however, is something completely unrelated to 'agnosticism' (it is simply unfortunate and understandably confusing that they share the same root). Gnosticism has nothing to do with 'knowledge', it is simply another religion based around a curious variety of superstitions and random supernatural elements (some of which are deities, some of which are not).
This designation of 'gnostic atheist' is a little bizarre as this individual would know that there is no God because some other supernatural element told him so! It's rather like a Hindu saying "I know there is no one God, because I know there are lots of them!" You wouldn't consider this Hindu an atheist.

Gnosticism tackles a variety of interesting theological issues, like the problem of evil, in some fascinating and unusual ways, but very much within a theist framework.

George Carlin didn't believe in God, and guess what? He died.

See: Go God Go, Go God Go XII