Do you believe in God?

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Of course I exist. Science is the proof.

Belief has nothing to do with it. People believe all sorts of things.

How does "or a religion" play in? Following a religion is not knowing God, by definition.

The only way to solve the puzzle is to sit down and figure it out for yourself.

Oscuria, do you really not see how offensive it is to write off so many people as worthless? Why are we worthless? Is there nothing of value except your religion?

Really, personal experience is supposed to make me believe in God? My personal experience is that there is no god. If he wanted me to believe in him that badly, I think he could have done a better job of making himself known.

You say we are deaf and dumb, but I think you're hallucinating. I may not see the things you do, but that doesn't make your sight the clearest.

Not to give grief (or defend Oscuria!), but the male pronoun is only used by the traditionalist and the ignoramus, and being neither, you should avoid it. Male refers to things that manufacture spermatazoa but not ova, ergo the pronoun tacitly assumes that God reproduces sexually and was sexually conceived. That's beside the point.

The claim is that personal experience can be that there is no God. Since God is the word for that which created all being that can be known, that translates to "personal experience that there is no experience, being, or knowledge thereof". Evaluating others' God claims is a whole different matter.

God does not want people to believe, or there would be one word for "belief" and "knowledge" -- all beliefs are by definition false, and God is the word for creator of what is, not liar of what isn't. How could God have made physics, chemistry, and biology more clearly demostrative of God existing? If you think a better job could be done, please enlighten me! Really, how?

no i dont [i]believe in God. I know for a fact he exists. I have seen the Archangel Micheal.
If you want to know God from reason check out st Tomas Aquinas proofs of goo.

The bible clearly states that Man was created in god's image, therefore he did have male reproductive organs. What he did with them however is not revealed.

Sorry, but this is too much fun...

If you want to know God from reason check out st Tomas Aquinas proofs of goo.

Great Freudian slip/typo!! Aquinas did the Prime Mover thingy, right? Unfortunately, the Prime Movement is the universe, so God the Prime Mover is, as advertised, beyond all human understanding, and all our wisdom is as foolishness next to the sum of all things past, present, future, seen, and unseen. For proofs of goo, we need evolutionary science, or a visit to a creek bed.

The bible clearly states that Man was created in god's image, therefore he did have male reproductive organs.

Except that the Bible is not always right, makes many demonstrably false God claims, and the term "image" or "likeness" is open to broad interpretation. Only children and RCCers really believe in God's penis and testes, right?

What he did with them however is not revealed.

If the RCC really speaks for God, he put them in little boys' mouths. Maybe the Big Bang is the ejaculate of the Lord, huh?

the Roman Catholic Church has the lowest incidence of clergy molestation of any denomination and is signifagantly lower than the general population

and he did a proof using pure reason showing God to be the only possible final condition of existance. I saw it demonstrated on ewtn.

Word; said it was having fun with comments. A close friend worked for the RCC, Cincinnati Archdiocese, he told me that 60-70% of the priests under Pill-Are-Chick (can't remember the spelling) are homosexuals, and deviant by gay standards (he is bisexual, and was in a relationship from age 15 with the had of personnel for the Archdiocese). My ex was helping him fingerprint everyone who came in contact with children for a background check, and this one priest literally peed himself, must have though an alarm would go off. Look, the RCC is opposed to birth control, which makes it the single largest cause of preventable death and suffering on planet earth, and the theology takes more from Roman Pantheonism than early Christianity, so forgive a tendency to poke fun at people who pretend to speak for God.

Edit: About "pure" reason, reasoning is a secondary factor in epistomology, by itself it cannot prove anything, it requires known truths to arrive at necessary conclusions, and even those will tend to assume a level of universality that is speculative in nature.

Galigo: I was actually being sarcastic, I think the bible is nonsense. And I'm an atheist.

Many theists take the bible quote for man being created in god's image literally (Jehovah's Witnesses for a start), although they are not happy thinking about god's wedding tackle or the functions of his digestive system and bottom. What I always wondered though, was why he had eyes before he created light.

Last edited by Spotty on 30 Jul 2008, 6:16 am, edited 3 times in total.

I'm an aspie, and unless either detailed workings of how the mind works (not the physical brain, but metaphysical consciousness behind it) or proven evidence of why the Big Bang happened, I'll continue to believe in God.

I am a christian (specifically presbyterian), and while I reserve my own opinions about some of those hot button "religious" issues (such as gay marriage and abortion), I also believe that it is not a human's place to judge what other humans do. If God really hates gay people, he would take care of it Himself. He is omnipotent and omniscient; who are we to second-guess what He would want?

It appears that you are saying it makes more sense to believe in god because science can't produce all the answers you require. At least science is clarifying the mysteries of the universe as our understanding improves. I think there are a lot more questions if a creator is involved, for a start, where did he come from?

Please stop using "he"! God is an it, or more accurately, God is God, the pronoun of which is God.

Where did God come from? Where did baseball throw? Both questions are fatally flawed and unanswerable. "Prior" to the Big Bang, no space-time continuum, no causation, ergo no coming, no from, both terms are unrelated to things that happen outside space and time. Science is not "clarifying" "mysteries" of the universe, science is demonstrating the reality of the universe, which is totally different. Everything being known must first be. Truth is causal to knowledge, not the other way around. The results of scientific experiments are confirmed because they are what is actually happening, or unconfirmed because they are not what is actually happening. It isn't that science can't produce the answers, or that anyone requires them, it is that answers are scientific because of God. Atheists believe that the Big Bang, origin of space, time, and causation as we know it, happened to result in an explosion that happened to result in four energetic forces, which happened to result in atoms, chemistry, biology, and intelligent life capable of scientific demonstration of the operating mechanisms of the Big Bang. The only difference between that and an intelligent explanation of God is that each of these things happened because the next would be caused to happen.

The only difference between God and No God is in human [psychology, spirituality], otherwise it is irrelevant to science in the least. Science is the how, God is the why. An analogy:
Q1: How did this man die? A1: Decapitation.
Q2: Why did this man die? A2: Angry husband.

Science will never answer value questions, and spirituality will never answer forensic questions, but both are concerns of philosophy. Wisdom is the process of revealing one's foolishness, without which science would never have existed...

As I have already said, god is a chap. The bible clearly states he is packing a god sized wanger between his legs (although we are not told what he does with it - ho ho!). Seriously though, I am normally referring to the "desert dogmas" god, who identifies himself as male.



Well yes, that is my point also. Whether you believe in god or science there will still be unanswerables, although science will always get there in the end given enough time (well, virtually). I was answering the argument that believing in god makes more sense than believing in science because there are less mysteries if you do so, which is clearly nonsense.




Your posts are a little confusing, are you an atheist or not? I am begining to suspect you're another one of these wishy-washy Deists.

Not an anything. Labels are for people who need to flavor the truth to swallow it. Choose to trade knowledge and wisdom with ignorance and folly.

GOD AND THE UNIVERSE:
God is just the term for the thing(s) determinative of the "Big Bang" and universe in some fashion, the limit of understanding, the point beyond which nothing can be known. Scientific theories and/or religious treatises that seek to explain "Prime" cannot be proven; before the energy of the universe slowed to the speed of light, "everything" was apparently some elegant math of energy, which doesn't really answer anything. God and Universe are fairly interchangable for all practical purposes, advocates of religion and atheism notwithstanding. Truth is, less said about God the better, just be very respectful of the laws that govern the universe, because the wages of sin (disrespecting physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, etc.) is death, and all have sinned, falling short of the glory of the universe as a whole.

This is why we engage in prayer (meditative thought) that the universe has forgiven us all of our violations so far, that we might not be tempted to violate, because it can hurt us and will eventually kill us, although outside the context of space and time, we "are" as we were, are, and will be. Knowledge of God is like knowledge of the universe in the night sky -- it is not the vast, impenetrable blackness that enlightens us, it is the innumerable, infinitesemal specks of light, like the reality of scientific inquiry of the universe being the actualization of words expressed in a prayer (meditation) attributed to a Jewish (stone mason/carpenter/mosaicist/prophet/magician/messiah) born two thousand years ago.

THE SHORT ANSWER:
I am an atheist in that I am without theology. I am religious in that I love God and accept the universe just the way it was made, and I respect that I cannot change it and it can and will change me.

Oh, you are another of those wishy-washy Deists.

It's no good refusing to be labelled I'm afraid, your own explanation is proof enough.

Still, I will wish you well.