What Religion are You?

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Agnostic, I guess, although I prefer no label at all. I just think it doesn't matter whether there are gods or a god, and I don't lean one way or the other.

Just chiming in, i love to see Sand and Ruveyn discuss such interesting matters. They come up with pretty good arguments which the other undoubtedly tries to deconstruct. It is quite the intellectual food. :p

I'm atheist, though I wouldn't class it as religion or faith.

I just don't see a point in having a God, makes no logical sense to me. Just what use is a non-material creator for a universe that doesn't need a creator? I like Spinoza's God, Pantheism sounds like a good styled 'religion'. Even though it lacks a conscious and thinking God. But overall i'm not some idiot who is going to say 'I have proof God doesn't exist!' of course I don't. But I use common intellect and see the chances are that he doesn't. And if he does i'll just have to kiss ass

But seriously, I don't believe in any God who has the little special attributes the Classical Monotheist one does. I mean, omnipotence and omniscience cancel each other out for christ sake, why would any self-respecting God have attributes to such a level that they would do that? Not very God-like in my opinion.

My reasoning goes exactly the other way around...

If there was nothing, we would not be here. Our existence is illogical and contradictory if we assume that we came from nothing. There must have been something that caused all that we can see and maybe even stuff we can't (yet) see.

Given the known laws of physics this universe would be lifeless unless some creative intelligence designed and build life.

We know that life was different in the past then it is now. There was development or evolution. Based on the fossils we find the the pattern of evolution of life looks a look like the evolution of computer: A new architecture suddenly appears (out of the lab), later multiple variations on this architecture appear. After a while older architectures disappear. What we explicitly do not see is slow continuous gradual change from one architecture to the next.

What we do see, even in current populations, is gradual adaptation: Separated populations will given enough time diverge, giving rise to multiple variations on the same basic architectural design. As an example: both tigers and lions came from a common ancestor, adapted to different environments and diverged to become very different animals.

So there appear to be two processes at work: One which causes new architectures to appear and another which reconfigures existing architectures to adapt to the environment. Given the differences it does not seem reasonable to think that some common process is behind both.

Biology shows us that life has a modular design and that all metabolism is algorithmic. We know of no unintelligent zero-knowledge process which can explain either of these features. The only other example of these features comes from technology we develop.

The reason humans design their technology to be functional modular is because given the way human intelligence works it's easier this way. We can design for functionality and hide the details away so keeping the number of part where we need to keep track of to the minimum, or at least within what we are able to understand.

All experiments with non-intelligent design, for example evolutionary (random variation/selection) processes, never result in a modular design, the designs that result are fundamentally alien to us. This is logical, these processes do not work as our mind does, there is no reason for it to use modular design and in fact it can't use modular design because it lacks the ability to abstract functionality.

We know that we can use evolutionary processes to automate optimal configuration of a functional system, but as far as we know (can demonstrate) it will never extend the functionality of the system or change the organisation of the system. Reconfiguration within the functional space is the best it can do. It's fundamentally not creative enough to design new architectural features, like new functional modules (eg. organs.)

Taking life as an obvious artefact of an creative intelligent designer I can come to no other conclusion then that there must have always been an (human like) intelligence.

This universe did not came from nothing, the default state is not nothing or 0. The only logical conclusion is that the default state is everything (whatever that means). More then that, that which caused the universe and life as we know it must also be/have a creative intelligence.

I think that in a way this means that the singularity already happened and that we are the resulting AI's...

I am a Christian by birth (Pentecostal/Protestant to be specific)

but....

I go on a Catholic school which really sucks 'cuz I'm not excused in memorizing those "saints"..They have a bunch of it..