The best reasons to believe that there is a God

I wanna hear yours. And then disprove them.

I'll start with one I've yet to disprove, mostly because it's so vague (which clearly, are the best explanations).

I was baptized when I was 13 in a non-denominational Christian church. Don't know why, it was popular at the time for my family... it made grandma smile I guess. Anyways they made me take "Members Classes" to engrain myself to the teachings of this church. This is what I got out of it:

I asked the preacher, "How do you know there is a God?"

He responded with this:

"Do you see this watch I have on my arm (nice gold watch)? Would you believe me if I told you that I made this watch myself. I got a shoe box, put scraps of metal in there, some springs i found, some glass, some screws.... then I sealed up this shoebox real tight. Then I shook the box. For days and day I shook this box. Everybody I met I had THEM shake the box. For over a year I shook the box. Then one day I opened the box... and pulled out this (he shows the nice gold watch again). Would you believe me?"

I said, "No."

He said, "Ok, so if there had to be a watchmaker who made this watch... don't you think there's a WORLD MAKER who made everything around you?"

I was convinced by his flawless logic. So I never came back to finish my membership classes. I think subconsciously I still struggle with this concept.

I now offer this to my oontz brethren, in an effort to see if there is equally rational counterpoints to his argument. And to hear the best reasons YOU have been led to believe there is a God... and that he loves you :)

Yeah, my reason is basically along the same lines as the preacher.

The structure is too complex and incredible to assume it happened by accident, it seems irrational. No matter how much we pretend to understand what is happening around us, we really don't.

Often I wonder if the people who deny the possibility of a god are just afraid of the idea. If something doesn't exist it can't effect you, right? Honestly, that seems to be the whole purpose of the thread.

The best reasons to believe that there is a God

I wanna hear yours. And then disprove them.

Why do you want to disprove them?

I think you should consider that point.

I see no reason to believe there is a god and so far in my life nothing has proven me otherwise or made me even consider that there would be a god, it is just completely illogical to think there is a god.

i believe in god or some type of deity becuase it doesnt seem that the universe and all the things that are in it just sprang out of nowhere.for no reason just appeared.and all the complexities of life dont seem to be,like mars says,just some accident.idk.maybe their is a logical explaination that could sum up all these things.but regardless its always good to believe that something is beyond this life.keeps your mind off your own mortality haha.sometimes i believe that religion is just that,a way to deal with the enevitable and to answer the things we cant even begin to understand. and to keep people in line to an extent but also personally feel that there is something out there.im a christian not becuase i completely agree with the scripture or whatever but mostly becuase thats what my family is and it just makes sense to kinda keep it in the family.the way i see it it doesnt matter what god you pray too its all the same.if there is a god im guessing that he or she doesnt care how you pray to him/her.so its all good.

 

The structure is too complex and incredible to assume it happened by accident, it seems irrational.

I will counter with a Bertrand Russel excerpt from "Why I am not a Christian" the 2nd paragraph I think is most important.

The Argument from Design

 

The next step in the process brings us to the argument from design. You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.

 

 

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.

 

 

 

 

I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.

 

 

i believe in god or some type of deity becuase it doesnt seem that the universe and all the things that are in it just sprang out of nowhere.for no reason just appeared.and all the complexities of life dont seem to be,like mars says,just some accident.idk.maybe their is a logical explaination that could sum up all these things.but regardless its always good to believe that something is beyond this life.keeps your mind off your own mortality haha.sometimes i believe that religion is just that,a way to deal with the enevitable and to answer the things we cant even begin to understand. and to keep people in line to an extent but also personally feel that there is something out there.im a christian not becuase i completely agree with the scripture or whatever but mostly becuase thats what my family is and it just makes sense to kinda keep it in the family.the way i see it it doesnt matter what god you pray too its all the same.if there is a god im guessing that he or she doesnt care how you pray to him/her.so its all good.

so its not logical to believe the whole universe just sprang out of nowhere for no apparent reason, but its logical to believe a god created it...so where did the god come from? he must have just sprung up out of nowhere for no apparent reason right?

this argument is invalid because it keeps going back to "who created the creator" and then you're back at square one again.

Honestly, that seems to be the whole purpose of the thread.

 

Why do you want to disprove them?

I think you should consider that point.

i would like to dispell the notion of a supreme creator, and bring people into the new age of living. I believe that it's quite possible that what we called God or Gods, were merely aliens... extra terrestrials, who put us on this earth, probably by mating with early man, thus creating "us in His image". Yes I stole my theory from a book, but so did you. At least I don't go waging wars over my belief system... and therefore it is superior.

and to mock, to give myself a feeling of intellectual superiority... you know, the kind of mental masturbation most introverted genius types indulge in.

why else?

oh and thanks for saying my thread has a purpose ;)

EDIT: that sounded dickish, but i'm not erasing. maybe you're right. this might be my cry for help and understanding of faith and religion in general. my purpose was to find out what drives people to believing whatever it is they do. if I can see how it affected you I may be open to it. see? sounds better now.

fungus.

every condition has to be JUST right in order for fungus to grow; temperature, lighting, humidity, the right mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide. if conditions are just right, the fungus grows and grows. it replicates itself a million times over... so long as the growing conditions are right. but remove even ONE of the conditions that make the fungus thrive and you will kill it.

we are fungus.

Floating through space, we caught the perfect storm of elements on Planet Earth. And in the grand scheme of things our lifespan is short lived. Millions of years to us tiny humans, with a definite beginning and ending.

Could it be possible that humans are just one type of creature out in space colonizing hospitable planets during their "perfect growth conditions" stage? Every few million years packing up and moving to the next hospitable planet?

Sounds like bacteria to me. Fungus. We are fungus people.

We're on a rock hurdling through space around a star that is one of trillions of other stars

in a vast universe.

Not a reason to believe there is a creator, but it's amazing nonetheless.

Could it be possible that humans are just one type of creature out in space colonizing hospitable planets during their "perfect growth conditions" stage? Every few million years packing up and moving to the next hospitable planet?

I'm an atheist. when you interject this bit you lose me. if we're going to be scientific about things, why do you suppose we're aliens/intergallactic travellers? it sounds like a big heaping pile of bullshit to me.

Intelligent design is predicated on a misappropriation of scientific terms and misrepresenting the scientific method.

I know myself and a few others on the board have relentlessly argued against it.

The simple fact of the matter is that Billions of years of time have allowed for complex systems to emerge where their sum seems greater than the amalgamation of their parts.

There is an entire section of mathematic theory dedicated to these ideas.

Systems theory uses models with very simple starting terms to develop wildly complex, vibrant and robust systems. Life, the universe and even consciousness can pretty well be explained by these ideas.

To MAR,

It's only accidental in the philosophical sense of the word. That it could have happened another way. But it didn't.

I would argue that irrationality in existential arguments is a hard thing to even bring into it. Is it rational to believe in science? Is it rational to believe in god? What do the terms rational mean in each use there? For that matter what does the word belief mean in either use?

In regards to science most who "believe" in it would claim that the rational is that which matches a certain logic. That logic is the same logic which drives the scientific and mathematic engine. It's almost tautological to call a belief in science "rational" for one would have already had to agree to that particular use and meaning of rationality at all. However, for arguments sake, let us call "rational" here to mean a belief in something that confirms or disconfirms a scientific theory set forth by very particular rules for empirical observation.

The same goes in converse for a "rational" belief in a god. What is rational is simply what is consistent with one's existential frame work. What seems improbable in its potential for the Christian is blatant in its logical necessity to the Scientific Atheist.

The disputes between the use of rationality and belief in these two cases sort of highlights the problem that Science itself has when dealing with Intelligent Design. The misuse of scientific terms and concepts is so egregious to those that follow and conduct scientific study that it almost renders the community immobile when trying to form an intelligible response to ID's claims. But to the lay-christian it seems to be "Scientific" rigor that affords them the ability to claim that there must be a creator if there are gaps in the explanatory power of a given scientific theory.

In this case it attacks Evolutionary theory and the idea that there are "gaps in the fossil record."

Which is itself a ridiculous argument. Science has never claimed that the fossil record is the grail of evolutionary theory. Particularly in light of recent advances in molecular evoltionary theory. We are coming up with much more accurate and concise visions of the living spectrum through genetic matching.

Just the other day there were major revisions to theories regarding several different types of dinosaurs. Rather than thinking they were all different species, it turns out that several were just juveniles of another species, etc.

Basically, the point is, science does not claim to know everything, and it is a built in function to predicate its own failures as a means of self revision. Religion updates itself in a much different way. The dogmas of the two may each require faith in their own ways, but the faith of a secular belief is tied to something much more earthly and real than any dogma of soteriology and omniscent, omnipresent and omnipotent beings.

That turned into a larger response than just for MAR, but yeah.

Also,

NSMBFAN- I'd heed Ski Mask's point and watch your use of pseudo-science. You aren't going to gain ground with either camp, be it secular or non-secular, if you keep on with those views.

You tend to sound a bit new-agey when you talk bout this stuff. And I can assure you there are few things less scientific than new-age hippy space bullshit.

just sayin.

best refutation of the design argument ive read ^^

I think crooked pretty much broke it down. But, framing the argument as one of two options, God exists or God does not exist, is very restrictive.

I believe in the concept of god, with a lower case g, but not in an omnipotent creator. I think Einstein put it very well:

"The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image - a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being. For this reason, people of our type see in morality a purely human matter, albeit the most important in the human sphere."

I would say that this "awe at the scheme that is manifested in the material universe" refers to god, both in a secular and religious sense. The idea of an omnipotent being in the sky watching over us seems like left-over superstition from a time when mankind understood much less about the physical world than we do now, but I still think the roots of religious feeling lie in this same reverence, this same recognition of the essential mystery underlying existence.

Everyone knows that science only gives us answers to "how" and not to "why." They even said that on South Park. There is no real incompatibility between science and religion. There is no fundamental reason or "logic" as to why the laws of physics work the way they do, there is only a self-consistent framework; god lies in the final, atavistic "why" that is beyond the reach of science.

William Blake was a non-religious believer:

"To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour."

I will counter with a Bertrand Russel excerpt from "Why I am not a Christian" the 2nd paragraph I think is most important.

This author seems to have convinced himself that science is completely right, thus he limits himself here....

He says that rabbits have developed white tails as a response to enemies, thus adapting to their environment. Thats evolution, and theres no design about it...but he fails to go deeper and completely misses the possibility of adaption ITSELF being a design. No doubt evolution exists, but you will have a hard time convincing me that there was a big bang and -poof- the universe was here....its all far too perfect, and clever. There had to be a mind or somthing behind it that designed everything to continue to evolve.

If you believe that theres a good(God) and evil(Satan), then it is easy to see why there are such horrible things such as war and the KKK. I believe that God gives us free will; he wants us to be able to choose to believe that he exists, otherwise we would just be boring slaves to God, with no desire to know him or check out what he created like emotions, earth, space, whatever.

Similarly, with the freedom of personal choice, we can choose to believe he does not exist. This is where Satan(if you believe in such things) influences the equation. We can choose to love our neighbor(God), or choose to join the KKK and kill people(Satan). People choose how they live their lives. People choose to give to a bum, to not bang anothers cats wife, be around for their kids, etc. People choose to wage wars, commit crimes, screw their secretary, etc. ('the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didnt exist' hahahaha)

All the bad things in the world could then be evaluated in light of this. How could God let all this happen??? ---because he gave us a free will because he wants us to choose to believe in him and enjoy life, because forced submission isnt a choice, so the desire isnt real. So in a way its like 'heres the earth, live in it as you please, and I'm here if you need me' And the reason he gives us this free will is because he loves us, and the reason he loves us is because he created us, and the reason he created us is because he was so freakin bored he wanted somthin to talk to!!! Or at least just to watch and see what we do to his perfectly calculated creation, just to test a theory or somthin. Maybe if humans fail he'll create some sort of other..thing.......

Anyway, I feel as though it requires a tremendously more amount of faith to believe that everything just appeared and works this well than to believe that there was a creative mind behind it all. If you believe in only what theory-based science tells you, because you can physically see it and you need that type of reassurance to believe in things, then in my opinion you are believing in the creation, not the deity/mind/god/whatever that created it.

Believe in god or not, who cares. I cant scientifically proove he does(although scientific impossibilities and unexplainable phenomena, not to mention the UNIVERSE, are rather curious.....); its all based on faith. You have faith that he does, or faith that he dont. Thats cool too-we can choose.

However I do challenge anyone to prove to me that there is not a god.

Also, Dawkins is a douchebag. His science is fine, but he's too full of himself to realize that maybe the "flying spaghetti monster" view of god isn't what religion is really about. He's no better than his critics over in the ID camp as far as I'm concerned.

The way i think of it is that God is everything and everything is God.

God is an idea that no human being can wrap their mind around.

There is no way to live in a three dimensional world and understand the meaning of God.

moons, nobody is going to prove there is no god. nobody is going to prove there are no unicorns or jackelopes either. so what?

how would one go about disproving the existence of anything? nonsense.

if somebody is going to claim a being or process exists, the burden of proof is on them to show they have their facts straight; the skeptic doesnt have to "prove" youre wrong, you have to prove yourself correct.

science again is all theory, no facts. The existence of a god is theory, to some not fact. its all faith.

**TO ALL:

maybe who/whatever that created life understood the extent of human intellegence and logic and made it so neither side could factually prove one or the other wrong---TO PROLONG THE FREE WILL ARGUMENT I MADE ABOVE so we would never KNOW FOR A FACT....thus forcing us to choose b/t one or the other...

moons, nobody is going to prove there is no god. nobody is going to prove there are no unicorns or jackelopes either. so what?

 

how would one go about disproving the existence of anything? nonsense.

 

if somebody is going to claim a being or process exists, the burden of proof is on them to show they have their facts straight; the skeptic doesnt have to "prove" youre wrong, you have to prove yourself correct.

exactly bra.

proving yourself correct is what faith is here.

I understand the free will and good/evil arguments, but if god is truly omnipotent and omniscient, then he must have foreseen the good/evil split that would occur and let it happen. thus making him also responsible for all evil in the universe, as he could have chosen for only good to exist.

and again, I ask, who created god? if he has always existed, or there is some outside framework that even he is beholden to, then why is the universe's existence without god so implausable?

moons, study up on wtf a scientific theory is before you try to compare it to a claim of the supernatural.

faith is belief in a conviction when there is no evidence to support your position. a scientific theory is based on observations, experiments, and...EVIDENCE.

youre outta your element on this one, donny.

and its been said a million times, but not being able to prove god doesn't exist, doesn't mean that the possibility of his existence is suddenly put on equal footing with the opposite. its not a 50/50 question.

and bump the fuck outta bertrand russell

so its not logical to believe the whole universe just sprang out of nowhere for no apparent reason, but its logical to believe a god created it...so where did the god come from? he must have just sprung up out of nowhere for no apparent reason right?

 

this argument is invalid because it keeps going back to "who created the creator" and then you're back at square one again.

like i said in my post.the belief in a god is more or less a way for humans to explain all the shit that they cant comprehend and to deal with their own mortality.i dont KNOW that there is a god but i still believe in one.is it blind faith.yeah.but it feels good to know,or think,that there is someone or something watching over me and that when i die i dont just rot in the ground forever.

the way i look at it theres a 50/50 chance when you die your either gonna rot in the ground forever OR that you live on wether it be in heaven or hell.so the best thing we as humans can do is to live our lives to the fullest and try to be the best person that we can be.and to show love to everyone.that way if you do die and you end up rotting its all good becuase you lived your life like you wanted.but at the same time if you die and your met by god he's not gonna be all like

"yo nigga,you were a douche down there.GTFO" so yeah.thats all that matters really.living your life to the fullest and not being a douchebag.

Dawkins is a huge douche.

His writings on statistics and coincidence versus correlation and thus against "miracles" is pretty great. But yeah, I can't stand when he just out right speaks about religion.

I also agree that the use of the word "god" can be seen in a somewhat secular sense. I think, however, that for those of us with such a view, the word "reality" suffices and fits our ethos much better.

Take certain particular uses of the word "god" in regular religious idioms;

"God works in mysterious ways." and things like that.

Replace the word "god" with "reality" and you will a striking functional equivalence;

"Reality works in mysterious ways."

"God willing" versus "Reality willing"

The phrasing may seem awkward, but the semantic content remains almost completely unchanged.

Both refer to an external realm of forces and uknowns.

In the latter case the semantic function refers to the future, to that which is yet to be seen or known.

In the former it refers to the way the entirety of existence happens and "works."

MoonsOfSulkendastron-

You don't quite grasp the sense of time that is inherent to a scientific secular view of existence. Can you conceive of 100,000 dollars? Sure, you can think of things that cost more than that. You can see a tangible reflection of of what that denomination will grant in this world. Take it to the next level, can you conceive of 100,000,000 dollars? Sure, there are cars that cost more than this, etc. Now take it to 6,000,000,000. Do you get what that number is? Can you grasp what that number really means?

I doubt it. The human brain really is not the best at dealing with such astronomical figures. In fact, that is the very etymology of the phrase "astronomical number" itself. For many years there were number that were used to measure the heavens (props to whomever gets the heavenly bodies reference) but have since been eclipsed (I'm full of em) by the use and recognition of higher and higher orders of numbers.

It isn't a very good counter argument to talk about "poof and then there was everything." Quite to the contrary, it is our contention that it took billions and trillions of years for existence and the universe to arrive at its current point.

Time is a hard thing for humans to consider in its fullest extent. Needless to say, I think that you need to come up with a better argument then the seeming infeasability of emergent systems over trillions of years.

Yes, there is a certain mysticism on the surface of the big bang, etc. But an important point to note is that science has not made a claim about the big bang itself, we only speak about what happened afterward. It is an important nuance to see the distinction in. Science is reverse engineering ridiculous amounts of time through controlled experiment after controlled experiment. The LHC at CERN is probably the single most important experiment to be taking place in contemporary science and physics. In an attempt to recreate the conditions of the big bang, one can begin to actually hypothesis about why or how it occurred.

Also,

Science, when you get deep into its theories sounds absolutely insane. Regardless of how out there or completely impossible the hypothesis may be it is only made and predicated on the ability to test a prediction that theory makes.

Religion doesn't do this. It is really really hard to compare the two because their fundamental aims are completely different.

im much more comfortable simply not knowing the answer to a question than pretending to know the answer, especially to questions nobody has the answers to.

science again is all theory, no facts. The existence of a god is theory, to some not fact. its all faith.

 

**TO ALL:

maybe who/whatever that created life understood the extent of human intellegence and logic and made it so neither side could factually prove one or the other wrong---TO PROLONG THE FREE WILL ARGUMENT I MADE ABOVE so we would never KNOW FOR A FACT....thus forcing us to choose b/t one or the other...

To parrot Dow in a slightly different fashion.

This is exactly the point about not understanding scientific nomenclature and science's inability to express it in lay terms.

"Theory" in science is not something that may or may not be true, it is something that is experimentally tested and has not been disproven.

Science works under the function of negation. We disprove incorrect theories and develop new ones which work better than the old ones, only to repeat the process over time.

You should really take a class or read a book on scientific theory before decrying the process itself, cus until then your arguments are going to be dismissed for the superficial level they stay at.

crooked is much more articulate than i. haha. but im better looking.

I understand the free will and good/evil arguments, but if god is truly omnipotent and omniscient, then he must have foreseen the good/evil split that would occur and let it happen. thus making him also responsible for all evil in the universe, as he could have chosen for only good to exist.

 

and again, I ask, who created god? if he has always existed, or there is some outside framework that even he is beholden to, then why is the universe's existence without god so implausable?

yea if a god was the alpha and omega and knew everything and could do anything, then of course he knew what was/is going to happen and the influence the devil(or evil) would have on it.

if u believe/read the bible or whatever it says sin/evil saddens God, but it could be argued that that is a product of his decision to give us free will. he knew it would happen. But if only good existed, it would be boring. For us and for him-he wants life to be interesting for us because we dont know anything other than this life. That is unless of course all we knew was good and that no alternative way(evil) existed, but the devil/evil existed before humans did (if you read Genesis/believe that). Also Revelation talks about the end of evil, and how good prevails, so in the meantime we as humans can enjoy life and choose to believe in it all or choose to not to because it makes us uncomfortable to even think about.

Maybe its a learning process..so in the end we understand good and evil and the consequences of choosing one or the other.

Id say if god does exist, then he is submissive to noone/nothing. He was always here...but got bored and wanted some action so he created imperfect humans he could have a relationship with and help in his scientifically perfect created world. He will always be too tho, so after the fall of evil, he can spend eternity with his beloved human creation that chose to believe in him in heaven..YAAAAAYY. Sounds like Sunday school i know. Just an idea tho.