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I’m firmly of the opinion that it takes as much faith to believe that this universe had no sentient creator as it does to believe that it had one.
BUT believing in a creator does not mean that you have to ignore scientific evidence of the way the universe functions
Ok that is your opinion. I wonder how you reached it and I also wonder if you started out neutral and came to that conclusion from what you learned or if you came from a religious tradition first.
It comes from the fact that there is no empirical evidence that a creator doesn’t exist (because evidence of a lack of existence is illogical) and from the fact that there is no explanation for the beginning of the universe that is logically sound (at least not yet). An infinite timeline doesn’t make more sense than an external being setting the timeline in motion
First off evidence of non-existence is not illogical. It is just hard to get access too. Here is evidence of the non-existence of a largest prime: well I tested the first billion numbers and I kept on finding primes. Now this is empirical and not very good but it is still evidence. I can do the same with say the Loch Ness monster. Setup sonar in the lake and find nothing. Again this isn't killer evidence but it is evidence. Additionally any god you advance that has contradictions in its properties is illogical and all I need to do is point those out. For example the Christian god is a clear violation of the law of identity.
Secondly not being able to disprove something doesn't mean we accept it. It means we mark it as possible and do something else. I can't disprove that there is a teacup orbiting between Mars and Saturn that doesn't mean that there is one or that I should believe that there is one.
and from the fact that there is no explanation for the beginning of the universe that is logically sound (at least not yet).
Gods of the gaps. Not having an explanation doesn't mean we get to advance a supernatural one. In every case in history we have done this we find out we were wrong eventually.
An infinite timeline doesn’t make more sense than an external being setting the timeline in motion
The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. And you are just moving the problem around. You reject an eternal universe and fix it by adding an eternal being.
Nothing new here.
You're missing my point even though you're so close to getting it. Because we lack sufficient evidence for both the purpose of proving there is a creator/creative force/god AND for the purpose of proving there is no god, it takes faith to believe in either. I suppose you could claim to believe in neither. I suppose agnosticism doesn't really take faith.
I get "your" points fine. It was argued over a thousand years before you or I were born.
We have no evidence of X that doesn't mean we have to have faith to believe in not-X. Not-X is the default, X is what must be demonstrated.
We have no evidence of unicorns, we have no evidence that there isn't unicorns. So I am not convinced that there are unicorns. I have to do nothing. If you want unicorns you get me the photos.
Also you are mixing up agnostic (a statement about knowledge) with atheist (a statement about belief). An agnostic atheist is someone who admits they can't be completely certain but believes there is no god. It is not the halfway mark between atheist and theist. I am an agnostic atheist. I concede that there could be some alien somewhere that is powerful enough that the word god applies to them, I really don't think there is one but I can't disprove it.
And anyway this is being nice. In reality we do have evidence against your skydaddy it is hardly neutral.
Please, tell me what evidence there is because most people seem to enjoy withholding it
Sure. We have the existence of evil, we have a solid set of physical laws that leave no room for the supernatural, we have an explanation for how we got here from the Big Bang onward that shows no evidence of intelligence operating behind it, and we have the violations of logic that most gods that are worshipped today violate.
The only types of gods we can still pretend exist are diest ones that haven't done anything since the beginning of the universe and small random gods living on another planet.
I truly understand the belief that the existence of evil contradicts the idea of an all-knowing and/or good creator, but I firmly believe that it doesn’t. The definitions of “good” and “evil” are so difficult to nail down that I don’t think the existence or perception of these concepts can disprove the existence of something that caused the big bang or something that guided evolution to the conception of humanity. Evil itself is a concept of morality and morality itself is extremely nebulous.
I agree our physical laws don’t leave room for the supernatural but that’s because we can’t reproduce the supernatural under the experimentational parameters which produced the definitions/theories of our physical laws.
The explanation for the big bang doesn’t explain how the rules of logic by which we theorized its origin came into existence.
I don’t understand your final point about violations of logic. I don’t think any explanation for the origin of our universe and the logic that exists within it can be explained using the rules of logic that are contained within our universe.
I understand that what I believe is not what everyone will or should believe, but I’m fairly certain what you listed is not evidence in the concrete sense.
Argument from mysticism is your first paragraph. Pretty common. Why don't you deal with the evil instead of telling people they don't have the ability to understand that their kid dying of cancer is a good thing?
Your second paragraph is an argument from ignorance.
Your third paragraph is not really relevant. I never claimed to know where the Big three in logic came from.
Fourth paragraph:
Ex. God is unlimited. Can God die? No. There is something it can't do. Therefore God is limited.
Ex. A = A, God is fully human fully spirit and fully human. Therefore God is a violation of the law of identity
Why don’t you deal with the evil instead of telling people they don’t have the ability to understand that their kid dying of cancer is a good thing?
I'm not sure what you're talking about. I never said that any god or creator that exists must be "good." I also never said that kids dying of cancer is a good thing. I'm just saying we don't have concrete definitions of "good" or "evil" so it doesn't really make much sense to try and understand the origin of the universe and/or the cause of the big bang by comparing it to morality. I also am not trying to convince you that a god exists. I'm trying to establish that it takes faith to believe this universe was not created by something.
argument from ignorance
Ignorance of what? The laws of physics are defined as such because of our limited ability as humans to run experiments on their consistency. Humans obviously lack the ability to cause supernatural events so how could we possibly run experiments on their consistency? Once we run experiments that prove something inconsistent in the laws of physics, their definitions will be adjusted to appropriately account for them. However, an event caused by a supernatural being's will would obviously not be representative of or fit into the definition of a law, it would be an exception to the law that we as humans could not replicate, so how could we possibly define a natural/physical law based on an exception?
we have an explanation for how we got here from the Big Bang onward that shows no evidence of intelligence operating behind it
My point in responding to this was mainly to say that one of our physical laws state that matter an energy can neither be created nor destroyed so where did it come from initially? If it was always there, fine but we don't really have evidence of that.
God is unlimited. Can God die? No. There is something it can't do. Therefore God is limited.
My point about the rules of logic applies here. Something that created this universe and the rules of logic that this universe follows would not need to abide by the rules of logic that it created in a contained setting like this universe.
God is a violation of the law of identity
See my previous point about the rules of logic. But also, I have not been trying to make an argument about specific characteristics or specific actions of a creator of this universe. If you want to argue against the Christian definition of God and the Trinity, go for it, but I won't argue back. I can't make any argument that the Christian God is the creator of the universe that isn't wholly based on faith.
And that's where it falls apart. Science isn't a belief system; it's provable and repeatable.
Science will look at the evidence and come to the most logical conclusion. Different people may well come to different conclusions. When more evidence comes to light, it will disprove some of those conclusions and we end up closer to the truth. There is no "faith" or "belief" involved.
Science sees no evidence of a creator, therefore it doesn't factor one in. The door is left open for people to prove that there is a creator, but so far there has been no such evidence.
It sounds like you’re describing science and religion like they’re completely separate things, but I don’t see it that way at all. I wouldn’t describe science as a religion, but there’s definitely faith involved in the current dominant scientific theories. Until theory has been tested to exhaustion and there are no more tests to run, the theory lives on as a theory because it hasn’t been disproven (either fully or partially) and there is an assumption that it will not be disproven. That assumption is faith.
They absolutely are completely separate things. Incompatible even.
You are confusing the colloquial use of the word theory in english and the definition of the word theory in scientific use. Which is one of the most infuriating things. I imagine you might even know better, but if you didn't, hopefully you learned something.
So how is theory defined in the scientific setting?
And I'm firmly of the opinion that it takes as much faith to believe that the universe has no unicorns that can fly as it does to believe it has none.
BUT believing in unicorns does not mean that you have to ignore scientific evidence of the way the universe functions.
See how proving a negative is silly?
By that standard, it takes as much faith to believe that this universe had no sentient creator as it does to believe it was created by space bees or whatever.
It doesn't take faith to not believe in a creator. There is a huge difference between "I don't believe in a sentient creator" and "I believe there was no sentient creator," and I don't know of a lot of atheists who are firmly in the second category. The lack of evidence (or need for it) would make for a better case for not existing, though, and with that in mind, saying "I don't think there was a sentient creator" doesn't require anywhere near the faith that saying "I believe there was a sentient creator" does. Being able to say "if there was this, there should have been evidence of it here" and finding no evidence is, itself, helpful to an argument of something not existing that would require evidence to prove it exists.
Religious get into this weird binary thinking, where it's belief in their particular thing or an equal disbelief of that thing, when it's really that that particular thing, lacking any evidence, is equally as likely as any other improbable and unprovable thing. Belief in God or disbelief in God, where it's really not believing in God, vampires, reptile people controlling the government, magic, fairies, or anything else without evidence, and all of those, lacking evidence are equal until evidence is produced. And that's not disbelief, it is the lack of belief.
It requires no faith to not believe in a sentient creator of the universe.
By that standard, it takes as much faith to believe that this universe had no sentient creator as it does to believe it was created by space bees or whatever.
Yup, that's my point. It takes faith to believe a creator does not exist.
It doesn’t take faith to not believe in a creator.
That's a good point. I hadn't considered agnosticism in this conversation. Refusing to accept something as true without evidence does not take faith. However, I maintain that it takes faith to assert that there is no god/creator since we do not have actual evidence of this.
Why? There is no evidence that a sentient creator exists or created the universe. So I have no reason to believe in one. Zero faith is required to have that opinion. Not knowing something doesn't mean I have to default to a god did it. A god is simply one of many possibilities, all with just as little evidence as the other.
Besides. Why can't there be multiple creators? Why does the creator have to be sentient? And who created the creator? Has the creator always existed? Seems to me that it takes more faith to believe a creator has always existed and then created the universe than it does to believe the universe itself has always existed. I'm not saying I believe any of that, but in this scenario either way something has always existed, yours just has one extra step.
We may one day find out what caused the beginning of the universe, or maybe we never will. Regardless, immediately attributing that which you do not understand to a god is no better than the people of ancient civilizations. Before we knew what caused lightning, we blamed Zeus. This is no different.
There is no evidence that a sentient creator exists or created the universe.
And there is no evidence that the universe appeared out of a void. I do not mean to say that it only makes sense to believe in a god/creator, I just meant to say that it makes as much sense to believe that there is a god as it does to believe that there is no god. I would argue it takes faith to do either, however it doesn't take faith to say you would not believe either without evidence.
Why can’t there be multiple creators? Why does the creator have to be sentient? And who created the creator? Has the creator always existed?
I have no answers for this question that don't involve what I personally believe on faith and not on evidence, and I cannot make any sensible effort to try to convince you of it so I won't.
either way something has always existed, yours just has one extra step.
I agree something has likely always existed, and whatever it is I would call it "the creator." I have my own personal beliefs about the creator being sentient but I have no proof of that.
Like I brought up in my last sentence or two, every other time we've blamed something on the supernatural, we have either found a natural explanation for it that precludes the supernatural (Zeus and lightning, for example) or have not found enough evidence for it to find it compelling (ghosts, for example). We've found no reliable evidence in favor of a supernatural being, be that ghost or god, despite our ability to do so being significantly better than that of ancient peoples. Imo, the more this happens, and the more the "god of the gaps" shrinks, the less likely a god is to be true simply on a statistical standpoint. Why should it be true this time, you know? If a horse loses a thousand races, are you still going to bet on it?
With that in mind, I don't believe it takes faith at all to actively believe there is no god. Just like it doesn't take any faith to believe a timeless unicorn didn't fart the universe into existence, or that there isn't a magical leprechaun in my closet right now that disappears when you open it. They all sound just as ridiculous to me. Now, I do agree that it takes faith to actively believe any positive claim without solid proof. If I said I believed the universe were timeless because I liked the sound of the theory, that would require at least some level of faith on my part. That's why I'm happy to admit I have no idea what caused it. It doesn't affect my life, so I can accept that it's one of the many, many things I'll likely never know.
I just meant to say that it makes as much sense to believe that there is a god as it does to believe that there is no god.
Now to wrap up my long-winded comment here, I want to say I agree with this completely. I personally do not believe in any god, but if you're willing to accept that a lot of your belief in one stems from faith, that's fine by me. I don't think you're stupid for it or anything. Religion itself and the belief in a god is not really a problem, though believers themselves do tend to be a mixed bag as many hateful views often stem from religion, such as anti-LGBT views.