Why God Doesn't Exist
Created on: October 7th, 2006
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^So objectively he allows people to be raped and murdered. Excellent! Obviously you're not a philosopher or theologian because that is not the way around it. The way around it is through some version of free will. Unfortunately, all attempts to reconcile omnipotence with free will have failed. See Malebranche for an attempt. See Spinoza for a better one (one that results in pantheism).
Well there's the whole "God will let you do whatever you want. You just go to hell for it." I mean, you can do other than he "commands" in terms of the commandments, but if you actually consider the logical implications of omnipotence and realize that an omnipotent got implies an efficacious will (whatever he wills, happens, necessarily. Nothing that he doesn't will happens, necessarily.) Existence is an extension of an omnipotent will... nothing can be that is not directly caused by him.
If you don't believe that God wills existence then you don't believe that God created the universe and you don't really have any reason to believe in God at all. There are certain things that Christians MUST maintain in order to not slide into deism or pantheism or some directly contradictory form of theism (or atheism) and... nothing seems to be able to reconcile the issues. Oh, except "God is beyond all of the natural laws for he is supernatural".
If people accept that God is supernatural, then all you have to do is tell them about the flying spaghetti monster that supercedes God's supernaturality and supercedes all other possible supers and this God says that you must not follow any god, not even himself, for you have no rational reason to believe in him or any other god. Also, if you do believe in him or any other gods you will be sent to a Hell like none that you could possibly comprehend. Do NOT mess with him.
"Huh? The Bible says whatever you pray for, you shall have
it. Too much work too look up where it's said." The stipulation to that was if it is in God's will. People who know the Bible and understand God's laws would only truthfully ask for things that they know God would grant them. Thus when I pray for a little extra energy in the morning to get out of bed, I get it, whereas when you pray for a toilet made out of solid gold, your YTMND gets downvoted.
""Huh? The Bible says whatever you pray for, you shall have it. Too much
work too look up where it's said." The stipulation to that was if it is in
God's will. People who know the Bible and understand God's laws would only
truthfully ask for things that they know God would grant them. Thus when I
pray for a little extra energy in the morning to get out of bed, I get it,
whereas when you pray for a toilet made out of solid gold, your YTMND gets
downvoted." ANSWER THE GOOD AND EVIL PROBLEM.
"Because what we may see as evil, He may see as something else. Everything
for a higher purpose and all." The bible talks about evil. You can't get away from it. The bible talks about an evil serpent. You lose. There is evil. Thus, the problem of evil. If someone can actually bring up a good rational argument to solve the problem, let's hear it. Malebranche, a Christian rationalist, attempted and, according to most philosophers, failed. Spinoza was a Christian and... became a pantheist...
"So why are christian people suffering from cancer not
miraculously healed?" Because it is not in God's will that those individuals be cured, it is the will of the individuals who want to live. What we judge to be evil in the short term may ultimately all be part of God's plan to create a greater good. So, for example, a grandmother dies of breast cancer, her grandchildren grow up to find the cure. A woman is raped in an alley, she gives birth to a Nobel peace prize winner. Etc.
"I do not usually vote at all on sites such as these, but in this case I
will have to make an exception as to prevent disproven sayings ending up in
U&C..." BRING US ONE OF THE ARGUMENTS. Saying that something has been disproven is not good enough to disprove an argument. Bring it here. Find it and bring it and I'll go find 30 counterarguments.
KORF41: "the problem of evil is REAL. The bible mentions evil. THUS, you
must account for GOD to be both OMNIPOTENT and ALL GOOD and somehow allow
evil to exist." FIRST of ALL, CALM the F*CK down and STOP with the IMPASSIONED TEENAGER random CAPITALIZED words TYPING. 1. God is omnipotent, you are not. Thus God is a better judge of good and evil than you are. 2. Free will is the alternative to living slavery, wherein all actions would be scripted to avoid us all struggle and hardship.
Korf41... You cannot be serious... You clearly do not know anything about him do you? He was NOT a fiction writer. He happened to make Narnia and it become popular, but for the most part he was not writing like that. He was an athiest that turned Christian and wrote many books and papers on these kinds of matters.
Kierkegaard is a genius, and a Christian, and says that there are blatant contradictions throughout the bible but believes that these are only there to give doubt as to the existence of god. Without doubt, he believes, faith is meaningless. The guy is, honestly, a genius, but he uses irrationality as a measure to enhance his faith. I won't, and I'll accept his claims that the bible has plenty of contradictions (including this one). Read Kierkegaard and stop the apologetics (and theodicy).
"God is
omnipotent, you are not. Thus God is a better judge of good and evil than
you are." It doesn't take a judge. All you have to do is read God's word. He says there is evil. I used LARGE CAPITAL LETTERS because http://largecapitalletters.ytmnd.com/. Also that statement is question begging but we won't even get into that.
"Free will is the alternative to living slavery, wherein all
actions would be scripted to avoid us all struggle and hardship." Actually free will is the alternative to determinism, which omnipotence logically necessitates. If you can prove otherwise I'd be glad to hear it. I really would. It'd be a philosophical breakthrough.
Alitheas... Are you serious? Life like that would render everything meaningless... We would learn no personality defining lessons and would be more ignorant then the most richest uninformed person that is born into wealth and has their entire life set up for them with no worries whatsoever. It is good that God knows most people would never want that (and I am betting all people would not if it actually happened)
"He was NOT a fiction writer. He happened to make Narnia and it
become popular, but for the most part he was not writing like that. He was
an athiest that turned Christian and wrote many books and papers on these
kinds of matters." Oh ok. He wrote a lot. Awesome! Writing a lot has nothing to do with whether or not his logic is foolproof or not. Like I said, bring his logic here and I'll give a counter.
"... YES." Then you'd also sacrifice any pleasure life could bring you, and nothing would have value. If all food tasted delicious to our subjective judgement as it stands now, no food would taste delicious. If the weather was always a sunny 75 degrees outside, we wouldn't even notice. Everything would be bland, everything would be scripted and predictable, life would have no purpose. Personally, I strongly believe that hard work is its own reward, not because I'm a masochist, but because it allows me
"We would learn no personality defining lessons and would be
more ignorant then the most richest uninformed person that is born into
wealth and has their entire life set up for them with no worries
whatsoever. It is good that God knows most people would never want that" This doesn't answer the problem of omnipotence and that it is logically impossible for this "choice" to be made.
"We would learn no personality defining lessons and would be
more ignorant then the most richest uninformed person that is born into
wealth and has their entire life set up for them with no worries
whatsoever. It is good that God knows most people would never want that" Also, if there is no god we get to learn these lessons as well. Makes you think, doesn't it?
"If all food tasted delicious to our
subjective judgement as it stands now, no food would taste delicious" Yes! Logic. If all food is delicious, then no food is delicious. Given that food is delicious, no food is delicious. Outright contradiction! Your logic fails miserably! That means you have a false premise. My guess? God.
"Korf41, like I said, I cannot find this book right now on the internet and
cannot recall the exact words he wrote... Please stop wasting time. Just
find the book and read the entire thing and you will understand." I read Malebranche. Same problem, probably the same strategy, probably the same ending. There's a reason you don't read C.S. Lewis in a class about rationalists. Because he's not rational.
"to relax in my beanbag chair and fire up the ol' X-Box. If I didn't work
hard, I wouldn't appreciate the value of my possessions, relaxation time,
or sense of accomplishment and well being." Atheism doesn't prevent you form doing any of this! Christianity does. You guys love to prove your own religion wrong, it's fun!
"Don't worry whetstone, max isn't God, and if he bans you, then that
will only prove taht your right cuz he along with the rest of YTMND is
scared of you and of course ppl r gonna say "were scared of you cuz ur
psycho" but u and i both know its deeper then that and were not psycho.
Plus if max bans you, then u have earned some pretty kool toys in heaven,
lol, as your mission will be accomplished. Max will inevitably be helping
you if he bans you ;) now thats irony"
"Well wasn't that Heaven which you just desribed? Life after
death?" A spiritual life, not a physical life. It's not like a cartoon, where you go walk around on a cloud, pet unicorns and get chocolate from a chocolate tree. It's a lot more ephemeral than that, and there's a lot of speculation about exactly what to expect. The Bible is very vague about its description of heaven.
I am not Christian by the way, or any religion out there, but I do belive in God. Now Korf41, Read........The........Book. And stop assuming what it is. That is all I am leaving. Whether you read it or not is your own choice, but if you don't and you assume it is not worth the time you are missing out.
"What? You just made a bunch of assumptions you cannot backup. Not
rational? And just how the hell would you know? You assume the book is the
same as other books?" I could go ask a professor if he's read the book and ask him to give an analysis of it, but I don't really expect much out of a fiction writer. Nor do I expect much out of someone who isn't a philosopher and isn't held in any regard as a philosopher. Christians like him because he's preaching his own crowd... aside from that...
"We weren't
talking about atheism. We were talking about whether it would be
preferable if God created a world without hardship." And, like I said, what you said you were doing is logically impossible given that God is omnipotent and all good. Thus, the Christian conception of god is flawed. The atheist conception, which is to say the lack of a dogmatic belief system, accomodates actions that you could deem as "good" and "evil" as do many other religions. But, not Christianity.
"Again assumptions, asking someone what they think is a bad idea. If you
wont read it and continue to assume "he is a fiction writer" and all that
childishness aimed at irritating me then so be it. Goodbye." Sorry, but there are millions of books in the world. I don't read every one that some kid tells me to. I'll read some Bertrand Russell instead. He's funny.
"It's not vague
about the problem of evil. Please try to reconcile it. I bet you can't! Get
on topic!" I did, you danced around it. God's a better judge of good and evil than Korf41, the militant atheist debating on a YTMND comments section. Thus God allows what God deems good to exist, not what Korf41 deems good.
"I did, you danced around it. God's a
better judge of good and evil than Korf41, the militant atheist debating on
a YTMND comments section. Thus God allows what God deems good to exist,
not what Korf41 deems good." I like that you say that God deems things yet it is, according to most philosophers, impossible for him to deem this so, logically. It just doesn't work. Also, you can't prove that he is a better judge. He can't come debate. Sorry.
"Hell is just consequence and repercussion. It's
an eternal feeling of woe and lament for acting against God. If nothing
has consequence, why act according to God's law?" I'm not acting against god. I'm acting according to reason. If god exists, god gave me reason. If god exists, he is obviously not the Christian god because he would be a logical contradiction. I have no reason to believe that god doesn't exist, but I have no reason to believe that god exists. Thus, I withhold my belief.
What?? Did you read what I wrote at all? I hold no organized faith, nor do I declassify science or evolution. The beliefs written in the bible are a way for mankind to explain the unknown. One engulfing desire of humanity is the need to explain everything, and we did so through religion. We now have a better understanding of things, so we can use science to explain. The ultimate question though is "Why?", and this can never be explained through science.
But honestly, take a step back and think about things for a second. We have a law of the universe that energy or matter can never be created nor destroyed. This we know. Our universe holds a set amount of energy and matter and will never have more. Now how did we get the energy that formed matter and anti-matter and everything we have in the universe? The only true answer you can say is "we don't know".
If you consider yourself to be governed by the laws of science and the ideas of philosophy, you HAVE to say there is a possibility that God does exist, and there is a possibility that God does not exist. We don't have the proof either way, so to say either God does exist or God doesn't exist takes an amount of faith, hense believing something you can't prove. It is fact that Atheism is just as much as a religion as Christianity or Islam.
Personally, I define myself with being agnostic because I cannot believe the various ideas in organized faiths. Organized religion directly contradicts proven science and was just a way of explaining the universe to a people that had no way of understanding it. As we mature, so will our religions. But I also can't say that God doesn't exist, because that would be equally ignorant. If you take a look at physics and astronomy and how exact our universe really is, it just seems
to have some sort of order about the universe. Like the fact that there were about 1 billion and 1 parts matter for all 1 billion parts anti-matter, and that imbalance makes all the matter we exist with today. The method that higher elements are created, how elements past iron are made from collapsing stars, the life of stars themselves, the mathmatical gravitational constant of the universe, and i could go on for days. Everything is so fine tuned in the universe, it just seems too orderly to be chaos.
Although, I might agree on appearing atheist by making a Ytmnd called 'Why God Doesn't Exist', well I'd make a 'Why God Exists' if there wasn't one already.
One thing I have thought about is that if we took away all life in the universe, exactly all life, what would be the point of the universe? There would be noone and/or nothing to experience it.
Arguing that everything is so fine tuned and gives the world such order so there must be a god is great. If everything were chaos there could be no life. Thus, we would not be alive to think about it. If gravity repelled instead of attracted then matter would be relatively equally spaced throughout the universe and no compounds, planets, life forms, anything would form. So to say, "why is it so orderly" is a bad question when the answer is "the reason you can wonder why it is so orderly is because it is"
To argue that life is such a rarity and has such a low likelihood of developing is similar. If life were impossible, we would not be here. It is possible. Regardless of how unlikely it is, the numbers line up at some point in the universe and here we are. Maybe we are the only ones, maybe we are one of many. It doesn't really matter... we know that it is possible for life to exist elsewhere because we know it is possible for life to exist here.
To say that life magically formed on this planet is to disregard that half of the history of the world was lifeless, that humans have developed in the equivalent of a minute in the world's life. It took a long time for life to develop to the point it is at currently. If the first lightning bolt had hit a pool of matter and formed the correct compounds for the first biological compounds to form and soon after (relatively speaking) life had formed it wouldn't mean anything different. It's just probability.
Now, to say that atheism is a type of faith is to completely misunderstand atheism. Atheism is an awful term as it describes two fundamentally and ideologically different belief structures. Strong atheism is the belief that there is no god. This is a positive assertion, as are all theistic assertions, and must be supported by sufficient reason in order to be considered rational and not irrational (such as faith). Seeing as many philosophers believe it to be impossible...
to prove that god cannot exist, this does not seem a tenable position, rationally. Thus, people who are strong atheists are likely either doing so on blind faith or flawed reasoning unless they can rationally prove otherwise. Weak atheism, on the other hand, is the belief that there is no reason to believe that god exists. This is different from agnosticism which is the positive assertion that it is impossible to determine whether or not god exists. Many philosophers, including Bertrand Russell...
believe that this position is as untenable as strong atheism. Weak atheism is merely the belief that there is no reason to believe that god or gods exist and no reason to believe that it is impossible to determine whether or not god exists. If a person cannot prove the existence or non-existence or impossibility of god or gods this is the default and rational position to hold. It makes no assertion at all. It is not a belief but a lack of belief due to a lack of proof of any positive theistic assertions.
I have no reason to believe that unicorns exist. This is not to say that unicorns do not exist either here or anywhere else in the universe and this certainly is not to say that it is impossible for unicorns to exist or impossible to determine whether or not unicorns exist. IT is not a belief at all. You cannot say that I have faith that unicorns do not exist. I in fact lack faith in anything pertaining to unicorns and lack any belief as to the existence of unicorns. A weak aunicornist is not crazy.
As to the question of "Why?"... Why do we need a why? Matter exists because it is possible for matter to exist. We exist because it is possible for life to exist, life came into being, life evolved into humans, humans had babies and one of those babies was you and one of those babies was me. Why were we created? I see no reason to believe that we were created through some force of will. The reason we, as a species, came into being is simply natural selection and chance.
Why does existence exist? People say that it is in God's nature to exist. Existence is a part of God's essence. If someone is going to argue for this, why not argue for the simpler explanation that existence is part of existence's essence. If something exists that is because it exists. That's a simple explanation. I have no reason to believe that matter has ever been created or destroyed. Now, matter isn't as simple as we thought it to be 100 years ago... antimatter is some crazy stuff...
but that hasn't changed our conceptions of existence. When matter and antimatter collide they release energy and split into other particles which are quite complicated in terms of their relation to matter, but nothing is destroyed. Conservation still holds. The last thing I think I'll mention is a strange question that apparently is popular as I've heard it from a couple people lately... the feeling that it is impossible for existence to be infinite because it would imply an infinite prehistory and...
For the sake of being brief, I'll only touch on one thing you said. "this position [agnostic] is as untenable as strong atheism." I don't see it as something that could be defended or refuted at all, but more along the lines of a consession into the fact that arguing either way for the existance of God or against the existance of God is simply just futile. I see it as the only factual choice on this topic since basicly it's saying "I don't know, you don't know, and we will never know, so why bother".
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