Thread: Do you Believe in God?

Originally Posted by brettv

Don't you think that out of the trillions and trillions of planets in the trillions of galaxies that there would be at least one planet that falls in the "Goldilocks zone"?

Also, the habitable zone that you are talking about is actually much larger than 1-2 mm. It's estimated at a distance of 0.725 to 3.0 astronomical units from our sun. (AU is 93 million miles, which is the distance between the Earth and the Sun). Even the smallest estimation is 0.95 AU to 1.01 AU, which is more than a millimeter.



I respect Michio Kaku and haven't read his book yet, and I am not arguing that our Earth is rare. It very might well be. But I don't think that is an argument for a God.

If you flip a coin a billion times, then you are eventually going to get heads 100 times in a row, is that a sign that there is a god? Look at the "Law of large numbers".

In regards to your first paragraph "Don't you think that out of the trillions and trillions of planets in the trillions of galaxies that there would be at least one planet that falls in the "Goldilocks zone"?" Well i say why not? Anything is possible given the right conditions and regardless the insignificance of the event happening if it has a chance of happening it will one day occur, we as human beings may not live long enough to witness such an event. Remember "Nothing is impossible", as long as it has a chance of occurring, no matter how insignificant the chances.

I'm no expert at this, but taking into consideration the habitable zone, we know that currently Earth is in one of the habitable zones, if it wasn't we wouldn't exist. Now considering Earth's current orbit, if it were to divert and take another alternative path around the Sun, every factor that influences the Earth's orbit i.e. the other planets and other variables would have to accommodate for this change to create another "habitable" zone.

My point is regardless of the number of "habitable zones", "parallel universes", chances of a particular event occurring or not. All these things cannot just appear "out of blue" with no explanation. Everything has an explanation. Now you might say that there are several unexplained events that we as human beings have no logical argument through which we might be able to explain such an event.

IMO and this my opinion only, there is an explanation to everything, EVERYTHING, the human brain and race at its present state is not sophisticated enough to understand and explain what we know to be the most mysterious phenomena.

"Believing that one big explosion created life on earth and made this possible is like believing that a library will explode and all pieces of paper will fall on the same spot and in the same order to make the books complete again---Albert Einstein"

i believe in God too!

Ok this is my last post targeted twords you because regardless of what you say i have a strong feeling that regardless of what is stated youve already made up your mind, so continuing the debate seems like a waste of time. Considering i spend 2 hours thinking these posts out, addressing your questions and statements in full. its becoming a chore for someone who brings up the same issues for me to answer over and over. Religion is based on Faith im sorry that you dont like it. To be so pessimistic and close minded that you cannot believe in anything not tangible or visible must be absolutely terrible.

1-again. yes we have been through it multiple times. Im sorry thats not how free will was designed. the world allows you to commit harm. people allow themselves to commit crime. thats how it is. sorry.

2. maybe God did, i dont know, never meet him. Im sorry that you dont/do ( im not sure which anymore) believe that hes immoral, but if you actually had faith in him i would assume that at some point you might accept that he might know what he was doing.

"What I'm saying is that evidence of these conflicts that kill innocent lives is proof of an immoral god to me and one I would not worship even if I had certitude of his existence." and hence closed minded, im glad you admited it. so no matter what we disscuss your not changing your mind, you say your open minded but right there you JUST PROVED thta your not lol. *phew exhales* This is again brought about by the fact that you have a complete lack in faith to believe in anything that is not visable or tangiable. sorry dunno what to say to try and prove it otherwise.

3. mmm...id like to think i retained my highier cognitive function. Thanks. so this is out on the table by claiming "faith" as you put it im not throughing away my logic nor my reasoning. even if my religion tells me something its still completely up to be to chose to follow it or not. having faith has nothing to do with me losing my reason or my logic.

4. yes natural disasters suck. i dont disagree, i just chose to believe that they dont die for no reason at all and they're maybe some type of plan in place. i dont know my interview with god is still pending. Again based on faith.

5. actually its easy to disput as ive been doing :). thats one message, i can look and find 10 more..like ive done...in fact i remmeber saying the stories were metaphors and lossley written so they could adapt to many different situations and be inturpted differently.

6. he talks to plenty of people, they're usually inducted into the insane asylum the next day for skitsofrenia. in all seriousness no your not open to any ideas, youve made up your mind as ive quoted before. regardless of what i say Taking it on faith is NEVER going to be an acceptable answer for you. i dont know why weather it be you just dont have any or you find it impossible or your incapable of producing any, but for some reason your unwilling to even attempt to see it from a position where you can pretend to have faith. which is fine, i just dont see any point in continueing this than.

7. maybe it is all fake, i still dont know, but i have faith in my own religion and i dont think its a bad thing. if people have faith in they're religion, it gives them something to believe in and i think it helps more people than it hurts. Having something to believe in, that is.

8. if your point was that you dont have any faith and are incapable of seeing any than yes you proved you point. I think my religion is correct because regardless of if its true or not or how it was forged it gives additional moral codes to live by, such as not questioning others faith :P, forgiveness it answered questions i had that my pervious religion hadnt and it gave me good practices to help me get through certin obsticals in my life. do i know that im not being swindled? no, i dont. do i care if im being swindled? no, i dont.

9. Addressed faith above.

10. ill take your first line as a compliment. Thanks. however i didnt always know they were and being young it was a good thing to learn from such an esteemed and widley accepted book. Plenty of people tend to forget or get lost inbetween the fuzzy area of what is right and what isnt, people need a refresher sometimes, that is a good tool to use to find basic moral codes. Id like to think that my parents did atleast bestoy sometype of morals before i even knew what religion was, and i think one of the first thinsg you learn is to not throw things. so i imagine most kids would know stoning peopel was bad.

11. how does religion improve my life? amoung the last 10 points and the pervious posts before this one where ive mentioned it many times in many ways...It gives me something else to believe in besides this world, it gives me additional moral codes to live by in addition to the ones i was brought up with. it teaches me how to react in certin situations and how to forgive and accept others, especially when i find it hard to. i could talk about the Pros all day because they are alot, and the Pros still continue to grow. thats one of the beautyd of religion.

12. no my points arnt taken at face value, they're based off of faith, faith being no proof, meaning not face value.

13. im sorry that you feel that believing in something without any hard evidence equates to ignorance confusuion and frustration. i think it makes perfect sense and ive given many reasons why it makes sense to me, and alot of people for that matter. im not confused about any of it. im open to change, ive changed my entire set of ideals once and would more then happily do it again if i found some reason to believe differently then i do now. You havnt given me any reason to judge my religion as inncorrect though, in fact you have actually backed it up more then once, i just dont think your aware that you have. im not frustrated, ive got meditation to help with that.

--. Im sorry once again that your unwilling to pretned you have ideals to attempt to see it from a different position than your own. to me i think your truely missing out, but i respect your choice. its your beliefs and your 100% free to do with them as you wish, but i think youve made it very clear that you are never going to be willing to accept any type of faith and that is the sole basis of religion, all of them, so i see no point in continuing this.

Josh

Originally Posted by Capt. Shanks

In regards to your first paragraph "Don't you think that out of the trillions and trillions of planets in the trillions of galaxies that there would be at least one planet that falls in the "Goldilocks zone"?" Well i say why not? Anything is possible given the right conditions and regardless the insignificance of the event happening if it has a chance of happening it will one day occur, we as human beings may not live long enough to witness such an event. Remember "Nothing is impossible", as long as it has a chance of occurring, no matter how insignificant the chances.

I'm no expert at this, but taking into consideration the habitable zone, we know that currently Earth is in one of the habitable zones, if it wasn't we wouldn't exist. Now considering Earth's current orbit, if it were to divert and take another alternative path around the Sun, every factor that influences the Earth's orbit i.e. the other planets and other variables would have to accommodate for this change to create another "habitable" zone.

My point is regardless of the number of "habitable zones", "parallel universes", chances of a particular event occurring or not. All these things cannot just appear "out of blue" with no explanation. Everything has an explanation. Now you might say that there are several unexplained events that we as human beings have no logical argument through which we might be able to explain such an event.

IMO and this my opinion only, there is an explanation to everything, EVERYTHING, the human brain and race at its present state is not sophisticated enough to understand and explain what we know to be the most mysterious phenomena.

"Believing that one big explosion created life on earth and made this possible is like believing that a library will explode and all pieces of paper will fall on the same spot and in the same order to make the books complete again---Albert Einstein"

That is the point that I was making, it had a chance of occurring, and it did, with our planet, and most likely with other planets in the universe. The universe is humongous. You said that if the planet's orbit was 1mm off then we would be frozen, which is incorrect, the habitable zone is fairly large by earth standards. If the earth had an elliptical orbit like Pluto, then that might be true, but the earth's orbit is much more circular than that.

The habitable zone has a lot more to do with the distance from the sun, and what type of star the planet is orbiting so that it won't be too hot or too cold. I understand what you are talking about with the different planets, some people think that Jupiter might have helped us survive because it took away some asteroids from hitting us. Which could be true, but that's night what I was disagreeing with you on.

These things do not appear "Out of the blue". Now I'm not going to explain to you how our solar system came to be, but just know that it was generally condensing gas and dust. We do have explanations for how these things came about, we actually know a ridiculous amount of information about how our solar system and planet formed.

I agree with you that there is an explanation for everything, there has to be. There is no "magic". Now if you think everything has an explanation, why do you choose God to be that explanation? That isn't even a real explanation, you can't test it, or really prove it in any way.

That is not an Einstein quote, I have never heard that attributed to Einstein, and could not find anything similar to it anywhere. And again, I don't think you know what the big bang truly was.

That analogy totally misses the mark. First of all, the library exploding would mean that the Universe exploded, which it didn't really. The energy and matter was a singularity, and that exploded outwards. And you are also taking exploded way to literally, it didn't blow up like a stick of dynamite, it shot outwards, like a firework. I'm not going to sit here and explain the entire big bang, read a Wikipedia article on it, I'm sorry, but again what you are saying shows that you don't actually understand what the big bang was.

Originally Posted by brettv

These things do not appear "Out of the blue". Now I'm not going to explain to you how our solar system came to be, but just know that it was generally condensing gas and dust. We do have explanations for how these things came about, we actually know a ridiculous amount of information about how our solar system and planet formed.

I agree with you that there is an explanation for everything, there has to be. There is no "magic". Now if you think everything has an explanation, why do you choose God to be that explanation? That isn't even a real explanation, you can't test it, or really prove it in any way.

That is not an Einstein quote, I have never heard that attributed to Einstein, and could not find anything similar to it anywhere. And again, I don't think you know what the big bang truly was.

That analogy totally misses the mark. First of all, the library exploding would mean that the Universe exploded, which it didn't really. The energy and matter was a singularity, and that exploded outwards. And you are also taking exploded way to literally, it didn't blow up like a stick of dynamite, it shot outwards, like a firework. I'm not going to sit here and explain the entire big bang, read a Wikipedia article on it, I'm sorry, but again what you are saying shows that you don't actually understand what the big bang was.

Why do people choose God to be the explanation? Well whether it be for my great fortune or maybe grave misfortune, the notion of God has been created by society that is why people may choose to believe in it.

I guess its not Einstein's quote, must be mine then i guess :laugh:

Shooting out like a firework is an explosion...

YouTube - Fireworks Explosion

By reading about The Big Bang on Wikipedia is useless...anybody could have made up the information on the site, its not a credible source.

Finally in regards to God, just because you cant see something doesnt mean it doesnt exist. Like i said before the human mind at its present state may not be sophisticated enough or too ignorant to appreciate such phenomena.

I highly recommend the movie "Religulous".

It is basically one guy (Bill Maher) bashing various religions (focused on christianity/catholicism), in a form of documentary plus comedy combined.

He is a bit crude and assholeish at some points, but a lot of the questions he was asking and points he was debunking are at the forefront of my brain every time i meet somebody who has "faith".

Originally Posted by andrewthecoder

I highly recommend the movie "Religulous".

It is basically one guy (Bill Maher) bashing various religions (focused on christianity/catholicism), in a form of documentary plus comedy combined.

He is a bit crude and assholeish at some points, but a lot of the questions he was asking and points he was debunking are at the forefront of my brain every time i meet somebody who has "faith".

That is a great movie and the message at the end was also very good. i never even thoughy of it +rep.

I loved when he was talking to the mormons and the guy outside the vatican both great parts! i reccommend it too! :laugh:

Agreed. :)
I think on this debate, does god exist, watching the aforementioned movie is entertaining yet enlightening, it just highlights so many flaws and illogical points in religions, especially christianity/judaism, which I assume this thread is about ("god" is a tad ambiguous).

Anyway, therefore my personal view is, no, "god" does not exist.
When we die, we die, out brains contain our personalities, our memories, our feelings, so when our bodies decay we are history.
There is a slim chance I may "find faith" at some point in my life, I guess, but since my current attitude towards those who do practice christianity is "deluded", much like people on acid seeing flying pigs, I emphasize the "slim" part ;)
=

Hello all,

I wanted to reply about the religilous film 10 days ago or so, but that's when the 55% for Brainstew kicked in and at the time I didn't have access.

I wanted to say that a man can not (or rather should not) base his entire life on the contents of a Hollywoodian film. If ten years from now, your kids ask you about God what will you tell them? To check that 2009 movie in order to get the answers they are looking for? One should be sincere about his beliefs and don't dismiss things because most other people do.

I have only seen the trailer of the movie because frankly I am a Christian and I already know that I am going to be offended. But all jokes aside, Christianity and the existence of a God shouldn't be solely decided based the attitude of the people that call themselves Christians, believers and the like. It should be decided based on what we feel as humans, our inherent need for a God and the teachings of Christ and the first apostles.

Regards
nik