Why don’t you believe in God?

[ChristineM]

Is, times have changed for the worse. In the old days most everyone believed in God. As God belief falls away people lack the morals they once had.

Yes times have changed, for the worse? I don't think so. Better health, less poverty, technology have all improved out lives.

And I've told you before, i would pit my morality against yours or anyone elses anytime. I find that falling away from god mean people need their own morality, not that forced upon them by god belief.

 

[ChristineM]

It would be natural for a child to understand that there is a Father of all.

Trying to get it into his head that the father of humans was an ape would be traumatizing.

Not true, i found just the opposite in fact, but of course my children were/are eager to learn facts, not fairy tales.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Well, the problem is that is not a favt that it is wordsalad, like the theory of gravity is based on facts.

That something is wordsalad is a first person subjective cognitivie evaluation and not a fact.

The question is if beliefs in any same are the same as facts and yes, they are in one sense. They are both words, function as a sign, have a definition and a referent.
Further they both reuire human brains, because they both referer to cogntive processes in brains. There would by no facts or beliefs without humans.
There would be an objective universe, but even that wouldn't be fact, because to judge it to be a fact, requires a human.

In effect you and I have relevant for some part of how we understand different cogntive schema. In computer terms we have different programs and to you your program is the correct one for all humans, because if your program produces a result of something being meaningless, then it is so for all programs and not just yours.
As a very simple example there are for all humans only one way to understand both 2+2=4 and 2+2=11. But that is not so, because it can be observed that there are different ways to understand that.
It is the same with words like fact, universe, culture, religion, science and so on. Your way of doing that is not the only way and when we leave natural science and enter the rest of human understanding neither you nor I are outside culture, cognintion and feelings.

But not to you, because there is only one cognition as a fact and that is yours. That is your trick. You are in effect as absurd as if you are ouside cogntion, culutre and so on for you to claim what you claim you can do when it comes to facts and word salad.

You really have to learn that there is more to the universe than facts and mere beliefs.

And again you try to twist everything and muddy the waters. It's a strange habit you have of overcomplicating everything.

No, facts and mere beliefs are not the same thing. These words are not synonyms.

 

[TLK Valentine]

It would be natural for a child to understand that there is a Father of all.

Trying to get it into his head that the father of humans was an ape would be traumatizing.

It would be equally natural for a child to believe in the Stork and Cabbage Patch.

Trying to get the realities of sexual intercourse and obstetrics into his head would be equally traumatizing.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

It would be equally natural for a child to believe in the Stork and Cabbage Patch.

Trying to get the realities of sexual intercourse and obstetrics into his head would be equally traumatizing.

Hey, stop making sense. It's not fair.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

And again you try to twist everything and muddy the waters. It's a strange habit you have of overcomplicating everything.

No, facts and mere beliefs are not the same thing. These words are not synonyms.

But there are no things as things, They are an abstract category of a certain kind of perception.
And there are no words as words, because all words are not words, they are either facts or opinion and all of that is a fact as a thing.

 

[Jimmy]

Here are a few to be going on with, all are falsifiable although over the years plenty of people have tried to falsity them, no-one has succumbed.

Futility of prayer
Childhood leukemia
The mosquito.
Unnecessary suffering
Billions of definitions of god all different.
Prevalence of evil
Omnipotence is impossible while free energy exists

Too bad you think this stuff is gods fault. You have a warped sense of what God is imo.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Too bad you think this stuff is gods fault. You have a warped sense of what God is imo.

So what is God?

 

[ChristineM]

Too bad you think this stuff is gods fault. You have a warped sense of what God is imo.

Ahh so the designer isn't responsible for the design. As good an excuse as ivete er heard.

 

[Jimmy]

Ahh so the designer isn't responsible for the design. As good an excuse as ivete er heard.

Could you do better? I think God did a pretty good job with himself.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Could you do better? I think God did a pretty good job with himself.

Well, you think that, but that is you thinking that. Now you just have to show that God is doing a good job as not based on how you think.

 

[ChristineM]

Could you do better? I think God did a pretty good job with himself.

I don't have billions of people clinging on to fairy stories about me designing it all

Im glad you say "i think"

 

[Jimmy]

I don't have billions of people clinging on to fairy stories about me designing it all

Im glad you say "i think"

You’re entitled to think that all of existence has always been here and that nothing was “designed “. It’s all good.

 

[Trailblazer]

Here are a few to be going on with, all are falsifiable although over the years plenty of people have tried to falsity them, no-one has succumbed.

Futility of prayer
Childhood leukemia
The mosquito.
Unnecessary suffering
Billions of definitions of god all different.
Prevalence of evil
Omnipotence is impossible while free energy exists

None of those are evidence that God doesn't exist
They are only evidence that the God that exists is not doing what you 'believe' He should/would be doing if He existed.
All of these are explainable as to why they exist in the presence of a God.

 

[Trailblazer]

Yes times have changed, for the worse? I don't think so. Better health, less poverty, technology have all improved out lives.

I was not referring to all those things, I was referring to morality.

And I've told you before, i would pit my morality against yours or anyone elses anytime. I find that falling away from god mean people need their own morality, not that forced upon them by god belief.

I was not talking about your morality vs. my morality or atheist morality vs. theist morality. I was talking about morality in general.
As I see it, believers are not more moral than atheists.

 

[Sgt. Pepper]

Could you do better? I think God did a pretty good job with himself.

If God did a pretty good job himself, then why does the Bible state that he regretted creating humans (Genesis 6:6-7)? There are other scriptures in the Bible that highlight his other regrets in addition to creating humanity (1 Samuel 15:11; 2 Samuel 24:16; Jeremiah 42:10). Surely, an omnipotent (Psalm 147:5; Job 42:2; Daniel 2:21), omniscient (Psalm 139:1–6; Isaiah 46:9–10; 1 John 3:20), and omnipresent (Psalm 139:7–10; Isaiah 40:12; Colossians 1:17) God would know better than to create something that he would later regret creating. Furthermore, wouldn't an all-powerful, all-knowing, and ever-present God know better than to repopulate the planet with the same morally flawed humans that he just destroyed in a global flood? According to the verses that describe his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, the answer is that he knew better, but he created humans anyway, well aware of the horrific consequences. Based on this conclusion, I don't think the biblical God can be described as moral, loving, and just, but rather cruel, sadistic, and psychotic.

 

[ChristineM]

None of those are evidence that God doesn't exist
They are only evidence that the God that exists is not doing what you 'believe' He should/would be doing if He existed.
All of these are explainable as to why they exist in the presence of a God.

They are as much evidence, in fact in some cases more so than any claimed evidence presented for a gods existence.

And the winner is omnipotence. For a omnipotence to exist then nothing else suitable even you could can exist.

 

[Copernicus]

Here are a few to be going on with, all are falsifiable although over the years plenty of people have tried to falsity them, no-one has succumbed.

Futility of prayer
Childhood leukemia
The mosquito.
Unnecessary suffering
Billions of definitions of god all different.
Prevalence of evil
Omnipotence is impossible while free energy exists

That list is a start, but a few of those items can be combined under a more general expression like "existence of human suffering" or "the problem of evil". And they mostly depend on attributes of a monotheistic god like the omnimax Abrahamic God, whereas atheism is about skepticism of gods generally. Believers try to resolve the problem of evil through theodicy argumentation. So the debate doesn't end by publishing lists of this sort, but there are lots of reasons to reject belief in God (and gods) that go beyond just relying on Occam's Razor to justify atheism.

Theodicy isn't needed if one abandons the idea that God is naturally benevolent--a gratuitous assumption, since the universe is obviously not a place that is hospitable to life generally. So far, we don't even have concrete evidence that life exists on any other planet, although the likelihood of its existence is fairly certain. The argument from design seems particularly convincing to believers, and that is why the discredited theory of ID has been raised in this forum a lot. So I would add Darwinian evolution theory and chaos theory to the list, because they support the emergence of life and an ordered universe without need of a divine engineer to perform miracles.

 

[ChristineM]

I was not referring to all those things

Ahhh yes that's as good as it can get.

I was referring to morality.

And?

I was talking about morality in general

Jolly good.

As I see it, believers are not more moral than atheists.

I can agree here but that's not how it came across in your post.

 

[Trailblazer]

I can agree here but that's not how it came across in your post.

Trailblazer said: Is, times have changed for the worse. In the old days most everyone believed in God. As God belief falls away people lack the morals they once had.