Stephen Hawking dead at 76

good post but something stood out to me

I prefer writing god(s) ( unless I am writing bullshit) for I have seen no evidence of there just being a single or many of them besides which I find it uncertain that the term for the proposed theoretical god(s) have god as an actual name ( as many supposed proposed theoretical beings and entities have been called gods, without that actually being the name of said being and/or proposed theoretical entity) writing god , singular, with a capital letter it would seem you have already predetermined several things which by your own admission cannot actually be proven or confirmed on the basis of evidence. This displeases Thor, Odin, Hela and Freya.

Is it weird that the supposed theoretical supreme source of morality and ethics seems to always have the contemporary morality and ethics of those that worship it? why would an all knowing, all powerfull and omni-present entity change his mind on important matters such as slavery and wether having a pregnant woman drink an aborteficant ( something which might cause an abortion) is a viable and accurate method to prove wether the woman cheated or not so frequently?
It would seem to me that as a source of morality this entity is no better than a sock puppet.

also werewolves or vampires, which is better?

I suppose I should also make clear my stances:

do I believe there is/are a god(s):
no
do I know this with 100% certainty;
no
do I find the concept highly unlikely and unnecesary to the formation of our universe and development of life:
yes.

 

you are correct in defining my personal meaning when I say proof, and your comment was an interesting read, I appreciate the time given to it.

when I claim I need proof in the god debate I generally mean any data to support the claim at all that can't be reasonably explained by any other more likely explanation along the lines of natural occurences in the world and/or human beings, the complication and the self phalacy to this concept is of course that one thing can have multiple possible explanation with only one of them being true, but I am applying the very concept you spoke of when buying the car. I don't have all the answer but am making my decision off all the given information at hand thus why I don't identify as agnostic, as a human being I need to make a decision off of what I have available and I refuse to stay neutral on a matter as important as the religion debate.

if more information is given I would change my opinion easily because i'm about as close to agnostic as you can get without actually being one, much like James Randi I am always looking for a different answer, but never find one.

I would like to expand on the unicorn example a bit, I mean your point was certainly made but I find this one interesting, what if the man said "There was a unicorn that farts rainbows in my backyard and everyone can see it if you just go there if he is still there", how would we then attempt to resolve whether it's truth or not? obviously we cannot confirm it on sight as it won't be there when we arrive. would you question the person telling the story? what if the story was full of holes, what if he's a consistant liar who makes stuff up to get attention, what if no other unicorns exist in your universe? what if their is no physical evidence at all of the unicorn ever being in his yard at all? obviously you can never be 100% sure the unicorn was never there, maybe unicorns don't leave tracks and can turn invisible at will we really can't be sure, but would you join the cult of the unicorn he now just created after telling this story?

to me truth is impossible, I will strive for truth but I will never reach it, that is the game as it were, but a relatively likely conclusion can easily be reached even it turns out to be wrong, that's the point of the discussion imo.

 

Yes, I believe he can live in peace after doing something I consider evil. My morality has no bering over another person

 

I will ask another theoretical question that to me defines the problem with proving god, and the phalacy in my own position.

you are standing in a small room, directly in front of you is a ball you have no idea how it got to the position it's in but you know it came from a small shelf on the other side of the room, now the question is easy, how did the ball get there?

my position is simple enough it seems given that there is no other factors in the room it most likely fell off the shelf for some reason and rolled to that position, mean while another concept posed to me is possibly a man ran into the room, took it on a trip to isreal, spent two weeks with it, they went binge drinking had a good time, and when he returned he just rolled it into that position and left it there.

now I don't know i'm right, and it's quite likely in fact that i'm wrong, maybe that ball bounced off a wall before it rolled to a stop, maybe a kid played with it a bit, but i'm fairly certain the other concept is wrong, i don't have much evidence to support my theory other then general principle that the simplest answer is often the correct one, but the opposing concept has no basis in reality, simply one of an infinite number of unlikely possibilities for how it reached that position. I don't lay claim to know the answer even in my theoretical scenario, only the most likely conclusion that can be made.

 

I'm an Agnostic Atheist. I don't have enough proof to be 100% certain that there is no god. As @M3tagam3 said, we only have inductive reasoning to base it on, which while it may get to 99.99999999% certainty based on available evidence, it's not enough for me to be 100% certain. I can understand that amount of certainty is enough for others to consider themselves gnostic, but not enough for me.

Personally I think people should believe in whatever they want if it makes their lives better without restricting another's life. If someone wants to believe the fire hydrant on the corner created the universe, that's fine, as long as the doctrine of the fire hydrant doesn't mean that the believer will prevent nonbelievers from making their own choices.

 

Well, this is fun... to watch atheist fanatics m@sturbating on their cute little rationalism, bashing them poor religious puppies. simply wonderful. thanks for the read guys.

 

Yeah I remember.

 

@M3tagam3 said, we only have inductive reasoning to base it on, which while it may get to 99.99999999% certainty based on available evidence, it's not enough for me to be 100% certain. I can understand that amount of certainty is enough for others

General issue with the let believers be believers is the fact that they can and often do use their believe to attack or control others, or even harm themselves in various ways.

I don't think I need examples to that point but if you do I'll grab my history book and a local news paper.

Religion is harmful, we cannot get rid of it due to freedom of religion and just general freedom but it is not good for the world, and It's arguable if it ever was, hopefully we evolve past it in time.

 

Yes, there are many examples of people that use their beliefs to attack or control others. There are also many people that don't. I am against taking anyone's freedom away due to the poor actions of others.

 

i'm against removing freedoms as well, thus why we cannot act against religion plain and simple everyone has the right to do to themselves what ever they feel is valid but the second their views impose on the rights of others then that privilege becomes void, this is not to say they can't say what ever they want, this isn't europe.

 

people are free to believe what bullshit they want but they get their feelings hurt when you call them out on their bullshit. which doesn't infringe on their freedom of bullshit but just hurts their butt a little making them butthurt.

when you say Europe in this case do you mean "The UK" which has always considered itself special and which is considered by western Europe to BE ..."special"

 

i like how you oversimplify your opponents ideas to your own 5 year old standard. keep going at it buddy, as long as it helps you cling to your oh so intelligent and rational "philosophy"

 

do you get hurt when people don't deify science like you do? when looking at your own attitude from a distance, don't you feel like you're demanding the non-believers to acknowledge the hegemony of your deity? after all, it seems that it's YOU that incites these childish and banal religious discussions when it doesn't necessarily relate to the topic of the thread.

 

Just for clarifiction, in case somebody extrapolates his infantile understanding of christianity on me, my stance on the abrahamic religions is close to this guy's

although I do think that an esoteric/gnostic approach to interpreting christian thought is legit.

 

You Firk a horse once so now you're a horseFirker for life mate.

science is not a diety and neither is logic they are tools used to find the truth, where religion is a tool for mind control and deception.
I simply care about the truth and you do not.
you simply water religion down to uselessness and claim it's good.

 

Yeah, these guys are pretty childish. They even advocate against freedom (calisk quote on darklord48).

There are A LOT of fake christians who spread lies. People tend to relate those lies to christianity, when in fact, nowhere do they appear on the bible, so they have nothing to do with christianity. They are made up interpretations of the bible, like when i pointed out what the 6th commandment ACTUALLY says.

Christianity is the truth. You could just read the bible, but I'm open to answer any questions you have that make you unconfortable about christianity. Specific things that you don't believe in.

 

removed the word fake, now it's acurate.

heard that before.

 

Advocate against freedom....all right

 

Going to generally respond to the posts I've read following the last one I made.

The reason why I used the term "God" instead of "gods" is firstly, because it appears that this particular discussion is focused on Christianity because of ProR2D2, and secondly, because in the philosophy world, the concept of "God" is much more logically consistent than the concept of "gods;" believe it or not, it's not arbitrary.

Socrates asked a priest named Euthyphro, who believed in the Greek pantheon (Zeus, Poseidon, Hades), the following question: "Are the gods always right?" The response was something along the lines of, "Gods must be perfect (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, or all knowing, all powerful, and all good), so I must concede that the gods are always right." Socrates then asked, "Would you say that the gods disagree sometimes?" Euthyphro responded, "Well, yes, they do." Socrates then asserted that there is a logical problem with this, because gods that are always right have no reason to disagree; it must be accepted that there are multiple imperfect beings that are not gods at all, or that there is one God (in philosophy this is almost always in reference to the Judeo-Christian God) that is actually perfect. Or, there is no God.

In addition to all of this, it is much easier to measure the logical consistency (which is argued to be a necessary condition of God's perfection) by assuming that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. This is also the portrait of God painted in the Judeo-Christian belief systems, where the Bible (and for religions besides Christianity, some other books) serves as the axioms for the belief. For example, some people ask the question, "If God is all powerful, why shouldn't He be able to change it so that murder is morally righteous tomorrow?" If we're going off of Christianity, the reason is because a perfect being cannot make a logical contradiction. If God has already stated that "Thou shalt not murder," then that statement, by necessity, must be true. So, God cannot logically contradict Himself by asserting that, "Just kidding guys! You can murder if you want to!"

There are many different religious beliefs out there, and it's very clear that not all of them can be true. If we assume that God must be perfect, then it would be both strange and logically contradictory to believe that God's idea of morality changes with that of his followers, such as on issues of slavery, birth-control, adultery, abortion, etc. I am going to assume that Geressen is talking about Catholicism, not that it matters too much. From an objective and logical perspective, knowing that a necessary condition for God being God is that He has to be perfect, then the most logical response would be that Catholics believe in a logically contradictory religion, since they claim that God is "learning" or "changing." A perfect being has no reason to change anything; the being in question is absolutely perfect in every way, so everything else should be changing, not the being.

Some Christians would say that Catholics are not Christians at all. These same Christians would claim that the Bible is the perfect word of God as it is, so it would be hypocritical to change it. Believe or not, they are taking the more logically consistent viewpoint regarding God's perfection. It seems very strange and inherently flawed that the Pope should have more authority over the Bible and religious matters than God Himself. The same applies to Mormonism, Islam, and other religions that use the Bible, but also add another book, saying "Well yeah, the Bible is the word of God blah blah, but we also need another book because God isn't perfect enough to get it right the first time!"

I find Calisk's position interesting. There are a few things I wanted to address. Firstly, you say that you think "truth" is impossible. Are you referring to all truth, or just religious truth? If you mean all truth, then there is actually a logical problem with believing that truth is impossible. To make the claim, "I don't think it is possible for truth to exist," the claim itself would have be true in order for it to have any merit, which would be logically contradictory. If you simply mean religious truth, then I'd like to discuss the difference between "truth" and "knowledge." What I have attempted to establish already is that no one has absolute certainty or knowledge that atheism or theism are false. I agree with you when you assert that we cannot remain in a neutral position; we are required to make decisions, and you believe based on the evidence that has been presented to you throughout your life that atheism is more likely than theism. However, this is all a matter of knowledge, or whether we, as humans being, personally have a perception of truth or not. The fact is, God either exists, or He does not exist, and this is a matter of truth; it logically cannot be both or neither.

I've thought about the unicorn example you gave and the example that followed in your next post. The central theme in both of them is the concept of Occam's Razor; the most simplistic explanation of the evidence is more probable than a more complicated one. The problem with this, though, is that this only affects our knowledge or perception of the truth; Occam's Razor never actually affects the truth. Now, I wouldn't join the unicorn cult, and I in all likelihood wouldn't care how the ball got there. But with the God debate, there is far more evidence, not only physical but logical, for the historical significance of specifically Christianity than of a unicorn that farts rainbows in my backyard. Remember when I talked about Socrates? Scholars today know who he was, what he did, what he said, and from what time period he came from. There is few, if any, debate or disagreement. Socrates is is a well-known philosophical figure, a smart guy, and is talked about all the time in academic environments throughout the world. Now think about this: the entire New Testament of the Bible was finished about 500-600 years after the time of Socrates, or any other famous Greek philosophers like Plato or Aristotle. And yet, even though scholars agree that all of the Greek stuff is accurate when there is less evidence for their work than there is for the entire New Testament, some people use the "oldness" argument, where the New Testament can't be trusted because it's "too old," people "made stuff up," or it's "too unrealistic." For works such as the Odyssey and Iliad (famous Greek literature from the time of Socrates), there are either only a few hundred copies or even less than one hundred; I do not remember off the top of my head. And yet, there are over 5,600 original Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that exist today, that you could go look at yourself if you wanted to.

This post is getting reeeally long; I could talk for hours on this stuff. I guess I'll leave this here and try to respond more succinctly and directly to the points people make in the future.