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God vs Science

Without fail, these kinds of threads will always end the same. =/

On a more positive note, I'm happy my story was a good (better?) read. I like that story. =]
 
chenman333 said:
You need religion to tell you what is good/evil or good/bad?
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What else will you rely on? Your gut instinct? What the government tells you? Some other fallible, generally hypocritical human source? Countless examples abound where personal morality and government edict fail to provide a solid and consistent moral grounding. When your only reference to right and wrong is yourself, you may as well have no morality at all.

God has nothing to gain from your following his laws. Worship is something Catholics do not because God needs it but because Catholics do, specifically to remind us that temporal authorities are neither omnipotent, infallible, nor always operating in our best interests. Our only trust should be towards God and his providence, and render unto him what is his (our souls) and to Ceaser what is Ceasers (taxes). Note that even if you subscribe to the belief all religions are a web of lies, most do not have any actual temporal goals that require anything above individual action and organizational efforts. Contrast people and governments, whose ambitious nature leads them to bend morality on a whim.

In any case, most discussions about God are pretty pointless, because he defies logic.
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Humanity is illogical. They believe asking God to create something their brains are incapable of comprehending is a limit on God's power, not their own cognitive ability, for just one example (the often touted Square-Circle or Rock So Big He Cannot Lift It canards).
 
Oh come on, that story was thoroughly horrible and I'm pretty sure it's been drawn directly from a Chick tract. That anybody would buy into this drivel terrifies me.

It is nonsensical to compare good/evil to hot/cold or light and darkness. That would mean there is such a thing as "absolute evil" (taken in the same sense as "absolute zero" here), but that is easily defeated by the fact that evil actions can easily be compounded into actions that are even more evil. Suppose there is a state of "absolute evil" which is the "complete absence of God". Well I can make that state more evil by killing one more baby. Nonwithstanding limitations on the number of babies that exist (which is a red herring since it applies both ways), there is effectively no cap on how evil one can get. Furthermore, no justification is given, or even attempted, to map good and evil to hot and cold and not the opposite - why would evil be a lack of good, any more than good would be a lack of evil? Why could we not say that it is good that stems from the absence of God? Furthermore, why is God compared to a quantity? Is God some sort of particle or substance that we can have in varying amounts? What the fuck does God even mean at this point?

Moreover, good and evil refer to classes of actions, not to actual states. Good and evil are to happiness and despair what heating and making colder are to heat and cold. Good is giving energy and evil is sucking it out (or vice versa, or neither). Even in a heat/cold analogy, neither is the lack of the other, which should be expected since they are classes of actions and a lack of some type of action does not magically produce actions from the other type. The OP's analogy fails in every way imaginable.

Plus, this attempts to place all the blame for evil on us. But what do we have to do with, say, natural disasters? They cause much grief and they do not seem necessary in the least from a non-naturalistic standpoint. So why do they happen?
 
Better yet, just read my story, digest it, and then don't get baited into an argument (aka, don't bitch about how athiests always attack God, but Christians rarely "attack" unprovoked).

Felt like it needed a Hipmonlee ending.

Have a nice day.
 
-Zer0- said:
Its his opinion.
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Yeah it is his opinion, until he said that it was "very true"

Deck Knight said:
Originally Posted by Fat chenman333
You need religion to tell you what is good/evil or good/bad?
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What else will you rely on? Your gut instinct? What the government tells you? Some other fallible, generally hypocritical human source? Countless examples abound where personal morality and government edict fail to provide a solid and consistent moral grounding. When your only reference to right and wrong is yourself, you may as well have no morality at all.
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Give me a break. Are you seriously suggesting that humans need to be threatened by eternal damnation before they will realize that killing people is wrong? This isn't the first time you have tried to slip an asinine comment like this under the radar, would you mind providing any evidence that morality doesn't come directly from people's own consciousness?

If you really believe this, then I am sorry for you. I have never and will never believe in god and I am far from being an immoral person, so obviously it takes more than believing in god to make you moral. There are plenty of reasons for secular people to do good and punish evil, people do it all the time. For example, there is: not being a dick, not trying to make enemies, trying to make the world better for our children, etc etc. The fact that you need to be threatened by an all-powerful god that will send you to be tortured for the rest of your life before you start to do good is indicative of your moral weakness.

I am honestly not even offended (as an atheist) that you would post a comment like that, I just feel pity for you because I know that you actually believe that humans are incapable of distinguishing good and evil on their own. That must be a sad, sorry existence.

Deck Knight, answer this honestly: Would you kill and steal if you weren't scared of eternal damnation? If atheists finally gave into the false burden of proof put onto them by the religious and actually DID prove that god doesn't exist, would you suddenly give up your philosophy that killing is wrong and helping people is good? (yes i know ive posted this question before but he conveniently never answers the tough questions)
 
Deck Knight said:
What else will you rely on? Your gut instinct? What the government tells you? Some other fallible, generally hypocritical human source? Countless examples abound where personal morality and government edict fail to provide a solid and consistent moral grounding. When your only reference to right and wrong is yourself, you may as well have no morality at all.
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You need to subjectively assess evaluate morality in order to accept it. It doesn't matter from where you get it. If you are told right now that killing yourself is good, it doesn't matter whether it is the government or your religion that tells you to do it, you would discard it as rubbish. Whether it be during your earthly life or in some afterlife, whether it be material benefits or a warm feeling in your stomach, being good has to benefit you in some way or there is no reason to be good. You wouldn't be following Christian morals if you didn't agree with them in the first place and didn't think that you would be rewarded in some way for following them.

Not to mention that your decision to follow Christian morals is effectively independent of whether God exists or not. I am aware that psychologically you'd rather think that you believe in true things, but as a matter of fact, God's existence is irrelevant to your arguments. What you are effectively saying is that as long as you believe he does, it's all that matters. You say nothing more than that.

Humanity is illogical. They believe asking God to create something their brains are incapable of comprehending is a limit on God's power, not their own cognitive ability, for just one example (the often touted Square-Circle or Rock So Big He Cannot Lift It canards).
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It's a limit on neither. God obviously can't make a square circle and that's neither a limitation on his power nor a limitation on our cognitive ability. It just doesn't mean anything for one to make a square circle. Not all sentences that grammatically describe an action (e.g. "To make a square circle.") actually do describe an action. Put in another way, God can perform any action in the set of all actions, so he is not limited at all in that sense. But "To make a square circle" is not a member of the set of actions, it is a member of the set of sentences that are structured to describe an action. Whether God can "make a square circle" or not merely depends on whether there exists some action in the set of all actions such that "To make a square circle" is an accurate description of it. If I say that there exists no such action, it does not limit anything or anyone by any stretch of the term.

As for "making a rock so heavy he cannot lift it", it can easily be done using a loophole: God simply has to make the rock and then nullify his powers, effectively ceasing to be omnipotent. He cannot, however, "make a rock so heavy he cannot lift it, while staying omnipotent". That is self-contradictory rubbish and there is no actual action that is described by that.

In any case, the only meaningful way to describe "omnipotence" is as the ability to perform any logically possible action, so I agree that it is disingenuous to try to disprove it using impossible tasks as examples.

Gay Dolphin said:
I have never and will never believe in god and I am far from being an immoral person
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Please. You are a gay atheist. That's two strikes against you right there.

Man, given everything that religion makes immoral, it's not a stretch to say that we're all sinners :(
 
^ And apparently don't see the need to step on every other religion's toes to make yourself feel superior. Although I do not agree with your beliefs, I am mature and tolerant enough to accept them and not get pissy every time you bring up athiesm.
 
I was going to bail out as soon as I saw Deck Knight post, but I saw this...
Deck Knight said:
So you believe the following:

a) God exists.

b) God is malevolent and/or apathetic.

What a horrible existence that must be.

Slightly more on topic:

Science and God are not two inherently opposing forces. They are not a duality in any sense whatsoever for a normal human being. The vast majority of scientists claim some kind of religion. This is because religion informs them morally where science informs them empirically. Science cannot determine good and evil, it can only describe events. Science can be used for good or evil, but cannot self-determine which it is. The results of human tolerances in Nazi gas-chambers being a prime case of bioethics where clearly the scientific method is used to analyze the results of what most would consider an atrocity.

The only time "science" conflicts with "religion" is when religion's moral precepts get in the way of a particular scientist's ambitions. This is pretty much what happens when anything conflicts with "religion." The only reason people buy into this duality is because it is much more convenient to call your opponents Bible Thumpers then it is to lay out an actual argument for government funding of your repeatedly unsuccessful, results-devoid human experimentations, among other things.
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...which is spot on for the most part. The ending is a little incorrect. He sort of goes back on what he said at the beginning and outright attacks "the other side" with a snide remark. But you know, ignoring that, good post.

And then this happened...
Deck Knight said:
The story is indeed terrible. This guy is no C.S. Lewis or Thomas Moore. Evil is defined in the Christian tradition as the willful disobedience to God. God granted human beings free will, and when Adam ate of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, he effectively passed the capability of sin onto the rest of humanity by disobeying God's only law for him. That is mostly backstory however. Modernity gives us ample evidence of the fruits of good and evil. I am not a hard creationist.



Yeah GD, I'm pissed at the costs warmists try to impose on the rest of us (irrational CAFE standards, indulgence-esque carbon trading schemes, banning incandescent bulbs and replacing them with poisonous, single-manufacturer (monopolized) CFLs, EnviroCops, Retrofit Police) too for their utterly shortsighted and scientifically erroneous claims, but this isn't really the topic for bashing nonsensical, but popular cults. Imagine listening to a bunch of people who claim your breath and the breath of every creature on earth is a pollutant. Haven't these guys heard of tic-tacs?
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...and I made a sad face =(

Then this happened...
Deck Knight said:
What else will you rely on? Your gut instinct? What the government tells you? Some other fallible, generally hypocritical human source? Countless examples abound where personal morality and government edict fail to provide a solid and consistent moral grounding. When your only reference to right and wrong is yourself, you may as well have no morality at all.
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. Yes. People without religion have no morals! This is extremely close-minded. I've already stated in another thread, to you no less, that I am agnostic yet absolutely have morals. Society imposes morals on us. I don't go to Church or the Temple to learn "morals". Hell, I can't because in my parents' religion, the priest talks in Sanskrit.

---

The reason Science disregards Religion is because Religion holds Science back. I'm not saying that in a "lol religion sux" sort of way. I'm saying this as it's the truth. You can explain any phenomena with "God did it". However, that's not what creates scientific advancement. You must disregard an all-powerful otherworldly being or we'd be cavemen. Gravity? We obviously each have a personal angel holding us down to the ground! Not a useful way to go about ways to defy gravity. Science cannot tell us to do something, as Deck Knight pointed out in his only rational paragraph in this topic. It can merely state what is observable. Sometimes these observations change. We thought the Earth was flat, after further investigation, we found out it wasn't.

My way of doing things is easier. If I don't understand it, it's magic =D Like computers!

b0b3rt said:
I'm a straight atheist. I'm going to die, and then not go to hell.

Meanwhile, I will eat delicious steak.
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In my religion we get to pick after we die. They lay out the terms. Reincarnation (+what you get reincarnated as), Heaven, Hell, what your choices are based on your life, and you can pick which one you wanna do! It's really quite nice. You should join. I haven't thought of a name yet.
 
I like the story at the beginning in regards to re-explaining some common man-made concepts and words, but God is also a man-made concept, a thought, or idea.
 
Firestorm, I'd like to hear about the inner workings of your own religion, if you ever have time to write it down. I'm big on theology and philosophy, and something like this might intrigue me.
 
my opinion to this would be god doesnt exist, our being isnt brought because of him its called evolution, i think people believe in god beacause they are afraid to die and truth is everyones going to and no matter how much you prey your going to be buried and put in the ground to rot
 
That's the only part of the religion I've worked out. The other is that based on what religion you're a part of, that's what happened. My Christian friend was going to go to Hell but as a Hindu I was gonna get reincarnated. Sucked to be him. But I liked this better so I'm going with this for now. We'll see how things work out.
 
thats what im talking about theres so many religions and your going to hell or your going to get reincarnated or relatives watching from above, after so many it all doesnt make sense and i agree with invishil saying god was a man made idea or thought etc...
 
The problem with this discussion: the existence of God cannot be falsifiably proven or disproven.
 
Altmer said:
The problem with this discussion: the existence of God cannot be falsifiably proven or disproven.
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There is no problem with this discussion. Sure there may be no final conclusions made, religious discussions are just slightly more opinionated than others, as there is little experience and few sources to draw from. I do not however take the logical positivist view that all such discussion is meaningless. Your post seems to indicate that you are agnostic, I cannot see how you can take any other stance after a statement like that, which is confusing, because I take that stance myself, but I find it a fascinating position to hold, as you can see the arguments of both sides and still take part in such debate.

Coming in and using a philosophical statement to try to render other philosophical statements meaningless is terribly hypocritical, especially if you are taking the point of view of a Logical Positivist. Remember that the VP doesn't even pass it's own test, and even under the FP, philosophical statements are weak at best.
 
Imran said:
There is no problem with this discussion. Sure there may be no final conclusions made, religious discussions are just slightly more opinionated than others, as there is little experience and few sources to draw from. I do not however take the logical positivist view that all such discussion is meaningless. Your post seems to indicate that you are agnostic, I cannot see how you can take any other stance after a statement like that, which is confusing, because I take that stance myself, but I find it a fascinating position to hold, as you can see the arguments of both sides and still take part in such debate.
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I never said the discussion was meaningless. It's a very interesting discussion. But the problem is that you can't shut ignorant people up because they don't realise religion is purely a matter of faith (irrational) and cannot be logically justified.

For the record, I'm an atheist actually; I don't believe we can prove or disprove the existence of God, but I don't believe in him regardless.

Coming in and using a philosophical statement to try to render other philosophical statements meaningless is terribly hypocritical, especially if you are taking the point of view of a Logical Positivist. Remember that the VP doesn't even pass it's own test, and even under the FP, philosophical statements are weak at best.
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No I'm trying to point out that people like DK operate under the assumption that the existence of God is a given, proven thing, which it quite simply isn't.
 
yeah i mean i learned that dark = abscense of light and cold = absense of heat long before too but the whole point of the story was for people to be able to connect with why people in this world have faith.

Obviosly it's made up let's not kid ourselves... and i'm atheist myself just to let you know. but let's not just go "lame god is fake, and that professor is dumb he shouldn't be teaching" yada yada yada... It's just to put a point across seeming all religions have failed to fight back since science has had all these recent breakthroughs to disprove the theory behind religions...
 
this is worse than that fictional story about the professor dropping chalk...

flaws (most of which have already been listed):
assumes professor is a fool. have any of us that have gone to college had a foolish science professor?
science professor being allowed to discuss philosophy and god. can you say "tenure revoked"? i know you can.
thoughts and one's brain can not be viewed. MRI, the machine used in sleep studies (the name escapes me). dissection, (once again) MRI, CAT.
that a science prof. would listen to a punk student. in my experience, science profs are the most stubborn and adamant teachers out there.
 
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