Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God

Read what? There is zero evidence for the existence of a God...period!

 

No. South Park did, though. The Answer is: Mormon.

 

Neither is the assertion that everything just came into being out of random chance. That is just as much conjecture as there being a creator of some kind. I doubt either argument will ever be proved conclusively but the odds for stuff just happening by pure luck are getting more and more improbable the more we learn about the universe. At some point people who support the pure luck model are going to be that sad guy that goes and gets Powerball tickets every week at the gas station convinced they are going to win......this time only the lottery guy has a much better chance of winning that just one of the nuclear forces being just right for stars to form.

 

my bias is for truth and evidence, you have none

show me where i said everything just came into being out of random chance

you can't because i didn't

 

There is no scientific evidence indicating that God exists. We all know that. For example:

•God has never left any physical evidence of his existence on earth.

•None of Jesus' "miracles" left any physical evidence either. (see this page)

•God has never spoken to modern man, for example by taking over all the television stations and broadcasting a rational message to everyone.

•The resurrected Jesus has never appeared to anyone. (see this page)

•The Bible we have is provably incorrect and is obviously the work of primitive men rather than God.

•When we analyze prayer with statistics, we find no evidence that God is "answering prayers."

•Huge, amazing atrocities like the Holocaust and AIDS occur without any response from God.

•And so on…

Let's agree that there is no empirical evidence showing that God exists. And there should be evidence - for example, this page describes a method that should produce incontrovertible evidence of God's existence.

Many of God's supposed attributes should create evidence. For example, the Bible says that God answers prayers. But we know that the belief in prayer is a superstition. The lack of evidence seen in the prayer realm acts as evidence that God is imaginary. So absence of evidence can be evidence of absence, because it shows that God is not doing things he has promised to do.

If you think about it as a rational person, this lack of evidence is startling. There is not one bit of empirical evidence indicating that today's "God", nor any other contemporary god, nor any god of the past, exists. In addition we know that:

1.If we had scientific proof of God's existence, we would talk about the "science of God" rather than "faith in God".

2.If we had scientific proof of God's existence, the study of God would be a scientific endeavor rather than a theological one.

3.If we had scientific proof of God's existence, all religious people would be aligning on the God that had been scientifically proven to exist. Instead there are thousands of gods and religions.

The reason for this lack of evidence is easy for any unbiased observer to see. The reason why there is no empirical evidence for God is because God is imaginary.

http://godisimaginary.com/i11.htm

 

There are only two options. Either the universe was designed in part by an intelligence far beyond us.......or it wasn't. If it wasn't then everything that exists now could only have occurred by chance. Its not that difficult of a concept. This is why the Angry Atheist Brigade is constantly trying to lump ID proponents together with Christians or other established religions. ID proponents only say that something must have gotten the ball rolling but Athiests deny even that. This is the same view that Einstein had before it was labelled Intelligent Design. This also happens to be the same view help by Deists before Einstien who didn't believe in the Christian God specifically. Only the packaging has changed.The only conclusion one can draw if you deny ANY outside involvement is that its all by chance.

If you were referring to "there is no evidence of god" regarding the Christian God, or Zeus or any of the other archetypes then I agree with you. I just find that people who dismiss ID outright to be just as blinded by faith as people who believe that if they work on Sunday they will burn in hell for eternity.

 

"absurdly improbable" says it all.

Well, the assumption that there are/were other universes is supported by the fact that there is at least one universe - ours.

And as for being the lucky one, from our perspective it is, since we exist in it.

OTOH, that does not preclude other forms of life existing in other universes where there is a different "fine tuning" amongst other forces.

The only thing we can definitively say is that 'LIFE AS WE KNOW IT" would not exist without such a balance of physical forces.
That does not in anyway endorse or negate a creator, despite arguments to the contrary.

 

So who created God? Where did he come from? Where was he before he "created the heavens and the earth"? What was the reason for creating the universe if he already had heaven? Why create the ENTIRE universe just so one little teeny tiny planet would have life on it?

And why doesn't he just show himself if he is our God and we are supposed to worship and obey him?

 

that's the epitome of fallacious thinking, a false dichotomy

one narrow-minded person might draw that conclusion, i don't

this excerpt from bart ehrman's book, 'jesus, apocalyptic prophet of the new millennium'

presents real evidence which shows that the bible isn't accurate

"FOR NEARLY TWO THOUSAND YEARS THERE HAVE BEEN CHRISTIANS WHO HAVE THOUGHT THAT THE WORLD WAS GOING TO END IN THEIR OWN LIFETIMES. THE THESIS OF THIS BOOK IS THAT this belief is as ancient as the Christian religion itself, that it can be traced all the way back to the beginning, to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus thought that the history of the world would come to a screeching halt, that God would intervene in the affairs of this planet, overthrow the forces of evil in a cosmic act of judgment, and establish his utopian Kingdom here on earth. And this was to happen within Jesus' own generation."

“And the End Keeps Coming


The failure of these past predictions to materialize has done little to stall the cottage industry of prophecy books. In fact, if millions of the Bible-believing faithful in America thought the time was ripe at the end of the 1980s for the fulfilment of the ancient prophecies, the end of the 1990s has created even more worldwide interest in the possible end of the age, even outside of the evangelical ranks. The end of the millennium itself is the chief culprit, a moment still future for me now as I write these words, but past for many of you who are reading them (unless, in fact, the End has come!). Oddly enough, people have been interested in this particular period—the time of the year 2000—for centuries. And the interest, again, has biblical roots.

Traditionally, the calculus has worked something like this. The story of creation found in the book of Genesis indicates that God created the world in six days and then rested on the seventh. Moreover, in the New Testament book of 2 Peter we are told that "with the Lord, a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day" (2 Pet. 3:8, cf. Ps. 90:4). In an ancient Christian writing called the Epistle of Barnabas (which some early Christians included among the books of the New Testament; it now may be found in the collection of works known as the Apostolic Fathers), produced around the year 130 CE, we find the first instance of a Christian maintaining the corollary that has been picked up by Christian date-setters for centuries: God's creation is to last six thousand years, followed by a thousand-year period of rest—the so-called millennium.

What, though, does this have to do with the year 2000? Well, for purists, nothing. As I noted, when the calendar used today was invented in the sixth century—by a monk named Dionysius Exiguus (whose name is translated "Dennis the Short" by the witty and fellow short fellow Stephen Jay Gould)—it began the new era with the year 1. There was no year zero. This means, technically, either that the first decade of the Common Era had only nine years rather than ten (Edgar Whisenant's temporary fallback position), or that every new decade, century, and millennium begins, like the first, with years ending with a 1 (1981, 1991, 2001, etc.). If so, then every old decade and century ends with a year ending with 0 rather than 9 (so that the last year of the 1980s, oddly enough, would be 1990, and the end of the second millennium would be 2000, etc.). Calendrical purists tend to prefer this second option, since mathematically a "decade"—even the first—does indeed require ten years, so that the year 2000 marks the end of the second millennium, not the beginning of the third.

But to return to the question. What does the year 2001 (or 2000, for those who just prefer keeping things simple) have to do with the calculus of the age-old Christian belief that the world was to last six thousand years? Since the seventeenth century, many Christians have believed that the world was created around the year 4000 BCE.

Actually, the date can be made more precise. In 1650 CE, an Irish archbishop and scholar, James Ussher, engaged in a detailed study of when the world began. Ussher based his calculations on the genealogies of the Bible (which state not only who begat whom, but also indicate, in many instances, how long each of the people thus begotten lived) and a detailed study of other ancient sources, such as Babylonian and Roman history. On these grounds, he argued that the world was created in 4004 BCE—in fact, at noon on October 23. This chronology became dominant throughout Western Christendom. It was printed widely in King James Bibles and continues to be believed by nonevolutionarily minded Christians today.

Why, though, did Archbishop Ussher not simply round things off a bit and opt for the year 4000 BCE, say, sometime in late afternoon? It was because he realized full well that in addition to failing to start the era with the year 0—a failing for which he can scarcely be faulted, since the concept of zero was not mathematically worked out yet in the sixth century—Dionysius Exiguus miscalculated the date of Jesus' birth, from which the era had its beginning. For if Jesus was in fact an infant during the reign of King Herod—as related by both Matthew and Luke in the New Testament—then he must have been born no later than 4 BCE, the year of Herod's death. This creates a problem, of course, for those who continue to work with the abbreviations AD (anno Domini: Latin for The Year of our Lord) and BC (Before Christ)—since, as sometimes noted, according to the calendar we use Jesus was actually born four years Before Christ!

The larger problem, though, is that if the world were to exist for exactly six thousand years—as many readers of the Bible have maintained since practically the inception of the Christian religion—it should have ended already, by noon on October 23, 1997. But the world keeps on tickin'.

I obviously won't be able to pinpoint every moment that every Christian has thought the world was going to end. That would require a book of about two thousand chapters. But I do want to show that this isn't just a recent phenomenon. And so, I would like to say a few words about several of the highlights (or, depending on one's take, lowlights) of the tradition, moving back in time now to the nineteenth century, then the Middle Ages, and then the early Christian church.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=c9K_6NN3llcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

Your conflating Christianity with ID which is what the article was referring to. They are two entirely separate things. Christianity has a specific architect with a name and a face and even his own autobiography. ID proponents may or may not believe in the Christian god. If the universe were formed with the help of a great intelligence there is no reason why that intelligence would ever show its face to us in the first place. It simply got the ball rolling and is now playing solitaire in another galaxy.

I find religious people and athiests are just two different sides of the same coin. Both are convinced that they are right because both sides yell at the other for not having evidence (lack of evidence IS NOT proof of nonexistence or existence by the way, any first year student would know that) so in the end it becomes probabilities. Early on people thought only a few things were needed for life to form, oxygen, water and carbon and the right planet. This is no longer the case as we find out how complex even the simplest organisms are and just the forces of the universe needed to be in the right parameters is astoundingly low odds.

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I must have missed something why is everyone talking about the Bible and God. The article was about ID which is NOT Christianity.

 

'intelligent design' is a political movement, which is overwhelmingly supported by conservative christians

"Intelligent design (ID) is the pseudoscientific view that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." Educators, philosophers, and the scientific community have demonstrated that ID is a religious argument, a form of creationism which lacks empirical support and offers no tenable hypotheses. Proponents argue that it is "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins" that challenges the methodological naturalism inherent in modern science, while conceding that they have yet to produce a scientific theory. The leading proponents of ID are associated with the Discovery Institute, a politically conservative think tank based in the United States. Although they state that ID is not creationism and deliberately avoid assigning a personality to the designer, many of these proponents express belief that the designer is the Christian deity."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design


"Bruce Kerry Chapman is the director and founder of the Discovery Institute, an American conservative think tank often associated with the religious right. He was previously a journalist, a Republican politician, and a diplomat."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Chapman

 

Oh... well for fun I would have to switch hats here.

I think it is well argued that the existence of everything in a finite universe is physical evidence of His existence... including the majesty that is the Earth.

I have seen some amazing sand sculptures. I could not prove this to you as tides happen and cameras weren't always part of my phone.

Many people claim the Almighty speaks to them. Some abstractly, some directly. We tend to dismiss those to whom he may be speaking as schizophrenic. That doesn't make them wrong. You presume all the world is fit to hear the words of God. God never spoke to all the people of Earth, save perhaps some isolated talks with Adam... I doubt He would need satellites to do it... he would probably opt for something less transient... like a book.

I'll get back to this after I read your link.

"Incorrect" is an interesting term. As is "obviously". Without delving too deeply into the minutia, the bible is contradictory, so am I as evidenced by this argument, made in the image of God. It is possible God's works appear contradictory, though His ultimate goals known only to him are unwavering. Jesus was asked 12 times what it would take to get into heaven. He gave 12 answers... each the most difficult thing for the person asking him to do. You might think this was contradictory... it might make sense less literally. It is also entirely possible that the bible has been corrupted by way of tittles and jots, by Paul, by the council of Nicaea... I am fond of pointing out most Christians have never read the bible, as they don't know Hebrew or Koine Greek etc... the same goes for my atheist friends.

Because statistics are flawless, unlike devotion. If one prayer is answered, it is no guarantee that the next thousand will hold the same merit.

Holocaust? Free will. AIDS? Depends on whether or not you believe conspiracy theories...

Proof is positively the antithesis of faith. Let's draw it out of the ethereal for a minute.

I have faith that my girl loves me. I have faith that she is chaste when not with me.
What proof should I demand of this? Shall I strip her naked and "check her" for signs of infidelity? Shall I stalk her? How should I prove this? What is our relationship if I demand proof? Where I come from... that's not love... and in the end, love is really what we are talking about here isn't it?

I believe she loves me, because she tells me so. It isn't that much different.

 

How so? The Christians are worshiping the wrong god?

AND the purported creator of the universe.

I think there would be tons of reason the simplest being to see how we are doing and answer a lot of questions which could settle a lot of matters.

Seems like an awfully big project to just walk away from, and it would be another universe. So did someone teach you this is how it is or did you come up with it on your own?

No it also needed an influx of energy and then the formation of complex carbon molecules which we have been able to recreate in the lab and then just LOTS of time.

We've known for quite a while how complex they are and it seems we are going to be able to create news ones in the future.

But tell me you seem to be trying to make a distinction between an intelligent designer, a being so powerful they could have created everything that exist in the universe, and a god, a being so powerful they could have created everything that exist in the universe. What is the distinction you are attempting to make?

 

Here is where I go with this principle.

Consider abiogenesis. It has occurred. Directed? Random? I cannot say. What I do know is that if it was a random event it occurred very early in the Earth's history under what look to be very unfavorable conditions.

Now consider modern biology. It's been very anxious to recreate this event and the tools brought to bear are becoming quite sophisticated, much more impressive than a random and hostile early Earth. Modern biology isn't really even close to recreating this event.

At some point in the future enough time will pass and enough technology will be employed in a failed effort to convince EVERYONE that abiogenesis wasn't random. I'm very close to that time.

 

Having something be absurdly impossible but occurring is not an appeal to probability fallacy. An appeal to probability would be saying because there's a chance I can win the lottery, eventually I will win. On the other hand, once I win the lottery the probability of winning is 1, but that doesn't make it less remarkable that I've won based on the difficult odds. Should I now go around saying, "The probability that I won the lottery is 1 because I won the lottery"? That is meaningless sophistry.

As for being the lucky one, that assumes a lot in terms of how this universe came to be. In the lottery analog, there's no requirement that I or anyone else even win a particular lottery. To be absolutely sure I win, I could buy every ticket combination, which would imply an infinite number of universes prior to ours, to ensure this one came into being. Even if you buy into the infinite universes, then the question is why would these parameters change? Generally change requires some sort of force or interaction. Where would that come from?

 

I'm forced to substitute 'AGW' for 'God' and laugh my ass off.

 

that's quite funny, considering that there is evidence for agw, but none for god

and the idea of substituting agw for god is ridiculous

 

Not sure I would call this science. Science is just a method based on hypotheses and experimentation. What experiment has or can even be performed on the hypothesis of God's existence? In other words, is the hypothesis even falsifiable?

 

Good question. I assume God has always been and always will be. I don't really have those answers for you.

See previous comment.

Where he has always been.

So you'd have a place to live.

Why assume we are the only beings among thousands of galaxies?

You don't have to worship or obey anyone.

 

This is all based upon your opinion and what you have accepted as truth, but not one shred of evidence exists that a creator exists. In fact, due to all of the obviously magical and mythical stories in the bible, the existence of an entity that created them seems all the more delusional. But if the belief works for you in your world, by all means, have at it.

 

Disprove what I posted.

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Your bias is obvious.

 

of course you don't understand how to make an argument based on evidence or who has the burden of proof


"The philosophical burden of proof or onus (probandi) is the obligation on a party in an epistemic dispute to provide sufficient warrant for their position.

When debating any issue, there is an implicit burden of proof on the person asserting a claim. An argument from ignorance occurs when either a proposition is assumed to be true because it has not yet been proved false or a proposition is assumed to be false because it has not yet been proved true. This has the effect of shifting the burden of proof to the person criticizing the assertion, but is not valid reasoning."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophic_burden_of_proof

men did


Religion as a Product of Psychotropic Drug Use

How much of religious history was influenced by mind-altering substances?

"The notion that hallucinogenic drugs played a significant part in the development of religion has been extensively discussed, particularly since the middle of the twentieth century. Various ideas of this type have been collected into what has become known as the entheogen theory. The word entheogen is a neologism coined in 1979 by a group of ethnobotanists (those that study the relationship between people and plants). The literal meaning of entheogen is "that which causes God to be within an individual" and might be considered as a more accurate and academic term for popular terms such as hallucinogen or psychedelic drug. By the term entheogen we understand the use of psychoactive substances for religious or spiritual reasons rather than for purely recreational purposes.

Perhaps one of the first things to consider is whether there is any direct evidence for the entheogenic theory of religion which derives from contemporary science. One famous example that has been widely discussed is the Marsh Chapel experiment. This experiment was run by the Harvard Psilocybin Project in the early 1960s, a research project spearheaded by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Leary had traveled to Mexico in 1960, where he had been introduced to the effects of hallucinogenic psilocybin-containing mushrooms and was anxious to explore the implications of the drug for psychological research.

On Good Friday 1962, two groups of students received either psilocybin or niacin (a nonhallucinogenic "control" substance) on a double-blind basis prior to the service in Boston University's Marsh Chapel. Following the service nearly the entire group receiving psilocybin reported having had a profound religious experience, compared to just a few in the control group. This result was therefore judged to have supported the entheogenic potential of hallucinogenic drug use. Interestingly, the experiment has subsequently been repeated under somewhat different and arguably better controlled circumstances and the results were substantially the same.

It may be easy for some to accept the idea that entheogenic substances played a role in the genesis of religion. However, when we move from generalities to specifics we are on less firm ground. There has been a great deal of speculation concerning the actual identity of drugs used for religious purposes in the ancient world. For example, what is the true identity of the drug soma used by the gods in the ancient Hindu Vedas? Or the identity of nepenthe, the "drug of forgetfulness" mentioned in The Odyssey? Although it is impossible to answer such questions in a definitive scientific sense, one can speculate about the various possibilities.

For example, consider the work of R. Gordon Wasson and the story of Amanita muscaria, the "fly agaric"—certainly the world's most famous mushroom. Wasson made several journeys to Mexico to research the Mazatec people and write about the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms in their ancient rituals, but his experiences there led him to tackle a different subject—the identity of the drug soma.

To understand the significance of soma one must consider some of the oldest religious texts known to man. These are the ancient Vedas, Sanskrit texts that represent the oldest Hindu scriptures. The most ancient of these texts—the Rigveda, a collection of over a thousand hymns—was compiled in northern India around 1500 BC. A parallel but slightly later development in ancient Persia was the composition of the religious texts of Zoroastrianism, the Avesta.

In both the Rigveda and the Avesta there is frequent mention of soma (or haoma in the Avesta). In these episodes soma is described as a plant from which a drink or potion could be produced that was consumed by the gods, giving them fantastic powers which aided them in their supernatural feats. People who understood the identity of the plant soma could use it to empower themselves and to communicate more effectively with the deities.

Consider the following from the Rigveda:

We have drunk Soma and become immortal; we have attained the light, the

Gods discovered.

Now what may foeman's malice do to harm us? What, O Immortal, mortal man's deception?
Or:

Heaven above does not equal one half of me.

Have I been drinking Soma?

In my glory I have passed beyond earth and sky.

Have I been drinking Soma?

I will pick up the earth and put it here or there.

Have I been drinking Soma?

But what actually was soma? There were suggestions that it was ephedra or possibly cannabis, but Gordon Wasson concluded that it was Amanita muscaria. Amanita muscaria or the "fly agaric" is a large mushroom that is instantly recognizable. This is due to its strikingly attractive appearance and its wide use in popular culture. It has often appeared in animated films (such as the Nutcracker scene in Fantasia, or in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), as well as being used in numerous types of kitschy household products and for illustrations in children's stories.

There are numerous details provided in the Rigveda suggesting how soma was prepared and used, which Wasson interpreted as indicating that Amanita muscaria was the true source of the drug. However, the most interesting and influential evidence that he considered originates from reports concerning the use of Amanita muscaria in the eighteenth century. In particular, in 1736 a Swedish colonel named Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published an account of the behavior of the Koryak people living in the Kamchatka region of Siberia. Von Strahlenberg had fought in the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia, was captured by the Russians, and was incarcerated for twelve years.

Among other things he described the use of Amanita muscaria as an intoxicant by the local people. He also noted the following unusual behavior: "The poorer Sort, who cannot afford to lay in a Store of these Mushrooms, post themselves, on these Ocassions, round the Huts of the Rich, and watch the Opportunity of the Guests coming down to make Water; And then hold a Wooden Bowl to receive the Urine, which they drink off greedily, as having still some Virtue of the Mushroom in it, and by this way they also get Drunk."

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/religion-as-a-product-of-psychotropic-drug-use/282484/

 

It's on exactly the same footing as AGW. No falsifiable hypothesis has been tested.

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See above

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See above

 

Time. Change requires time... all other variables are interchangeable and therefor meaningless. So how was there change that resulted in time? Occam's razor suggests that there wasn't. All of these scenarios are getting the chicken or egg dilemma wrong. Time happened... why? That is the question.

How could a stateless set of dimensions incur change without time? Maybe it is a loop. Expansion contraction expansion contraction, giving the rest of the dimensions a pulse. Time gets tricky in a black hole. The density of all matter in the universe compressing in on itself might just give the impression of the birth of time each cycle. The answer is somewhat fractal like in nature I am guessing. The whole of time, space and the known universe is but a shallow ridge on an infinite fractal of being.