atheist to christian

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indeed my faith tells me there is a god and profoundly respect the right of others to decide there is not however i cant stomach it when they then think I’m somehow stupid there have been much smarter people then me and people with much better scientific credentials then me who have both agreed and dis agreed with me

Faith without hard empirical evidence to back it up is delusion and fantasy. The world runs on facts, not fond hopes.

ruveyn

They just don't want to be sued sometime in the future when some unknown disease is found to have originated in consuming undercooked steak. I love a good bloody steak though.

I'm not religious, but to be fair, believing we are an accident is almost as crazy as believing in Christ and imo, quite a bit more depressing too. Not that how happy a belief is is relevant to its status as truth, of course.

If I have that its not faith any more I dont have faith the sun will come up tommorw I dont need faith for that I know it

Betting on the sun rise is odds on. The sun has being rising (which really means the Earth is rotating west to east) for the past 4 billion years or even more.

ruveyn

If you get into the nitty gritty of it, nothing is an accident. Everything is cause and effect, and from the moment time began until this moment, everything has been a chain of events leading up to how everything is.

There is no reason to believe that we are an accident, despite having a lack of religion.

Well, if you're gonna be really semantic yeah. I guess what I mean by 'accident' is more that human beings, and by extension life and the universe itself, simply came out of nothing and inanimate matter. Personally I subscribe to the watchmaker argument, though I highly doubt that the designer(s) is Yahweh.

That is the best post I've read here!

I just read it to my son & he thought it was brilliant too, just yesterday we were discussing why he has to learn that stuff for the only compulsory GCSE, Religious Studies. He is refusing to learn bible stories, says its just stupid. Hard to convince someone to put effort into something pointless really. I try to get the point across that its an extra GCSE, but in truth its probably not what employers are really looking for.....

Any chance you could distill it into a few words so I can put the essence of it on a car sticker?
On second thoughts no, I might get my windows smashed by some God is Love christain.

Sometimes when I talk about the chain of causality in conversation, I give the analogy of a complex clockwork device in action.

But that is very different from the watchmaker analogy... There is a fatal flaw in the watchmaker argument. It is essentially arguing for irreducible complexity. But that just simply isn't true for any biological organ/feature. Even something as complex as the human eye can be followed through a natural progression from a light sensitive membrane to a fully functional modern eye. And if we look in nature, we can see examples of eyes at varying degrees along this general scale of complexity.

Sometimes when I talk about the chain of causality in conversation, I give the analogy of a complex clockwork device in action.

But that is very different from the watchmaker analogy... There is a fatal flaw in the watchmaker argument. It is essentially arguing for irreducible complexity. But that just simply isn't true for any biological organ/feature. Even something as complex as the human eye can be followed through a natural progression from a light sensitive membrane to a fully functional modern eye. And if we look in nature, we can see examples of eyes at varying degrees along this general scale of complexity.

Thanks!

"Why did god have to sacrifice Jesus to forgive mankind? Couldn't he just have turned the other cheek?"

Or something like that I spose. The whole idea of needing to kill his son(or himself?) to even be able to forgive mankind for eating an apple confuses me to no end though.

Granted, but what about life itself? We still have no clue how life formed, we know that amino acids can form in chemical reactions, but we have never simulated how they combine and become life.

I don't know, I look around at our world, at our civilisation, and it is just hard for me to imagine it is all just the result of chance. I'm not saying a bearded man created it all, I'm just saying the Universe itself seems intelligent.

I could be wrong. It might all be random chance. But I really don't think there is any proof of that.

Oh I fully understand where you are coming from.

The only two things we seem to see differently in this regard, is I don't think the words like "accident", "chance" or "luck" have any real meaning. Everything is exactly the way it was always going to be, down to the smallest detail. It may sound like I'm arguing semantics, but I don't mean to. In this regard I know my viewpoint can be hard to fathom, it took me a long while to get here myself...but the difference for me is a critical one, that's why I mentioned it. For me, the understanding that all things happen exactly as they are supposed to happen fundamentally changes the way I view the world.

The other difference would be that when I don't have an answer for something, I don't use an answer at all. Again, it took a while to be comfortable just having large holes in my understanding of the world, and I can understand how it can be a scary realization that you simply don't know something that is terrifyingly important to you. But for me it more important to be intellectually honest with myself than to avoid the potential suffering that facing an unknown might bring. And I completely sympathize with why people fill in the blanks of their understanding, especially ones like death and life and deeper meaning and origins etc.

For a long while I had concluded it was generally for the best that people have some form of faith, even if I never could. That at least in their potentially delusional beliefs they would have peace, even if it wasn't grounded in reality. But eventually I couldn't ignore the real world damage delusional belief in the unknowable was causing, and have since taken a far more critical stance on all things religion.

But to address your question, about the origin of the first living thing; we don’t yet know what caused it. But that doesn’t mean we never will, or that it is unknowable how this could have happened. But just because we don’t know, doesn’t mean it had to be something supernatural.

I don't so much mean i think it just poofed into existence, I guess I'm saying I think the laws of the Universe were likely set by some kind of intelligence and the design of it was made so that life and intelligence would eventually emerge from it.

I always concede to the deist pov that there could be a Prime Mover type deity. I don't subscribe to it myself, but it is a possibility that isn't completely incoherent logically. So yes, I agree, the laws of the universe could have been set, and the initial "push", so to speak, originated by some unknown entity like thing that no longer needs actively play a role in the universe. I don't see the point, personally in thinking that...but I do freely admit it "could" be the case.