How is it provided that an infinite being was responsible for anything?
Well, on this point I’ve agreed with you from the start. Although I’d prefer to refer to “religion” as personal spirituality as it’s the supposed idea that religion is the organised form of spirituality whose dogma’s (and interpretations therefrom) are dictated impersonally, and therein lies the issue when debates such as these arise.
I suppose I should be more clear, but I find it hard to be clear on the topic of faith.
What I can be clear on is I don’t mean any malice and I don’t mean to intrude on anyone’s belief. It is clear that I believe in a God and that is MY belief. I don’t want any of you to think that I am making it my mission to make any of you believe that.
I also have to realize that as a natural being I must accept facts of the natural world. After death, we will see what we will see.
Please don’t feel threatened by me. I don’t judge people by what they personally believe, I only judge them by their acts and their character.
With that said, Soup you might be absolutely right and I am opened to consider that question. None of us can know for sure and by making a definitive claim, I made a error. I moved the debate to a whole new level. I apologize for that.
No worries, I didn’t in the least feel threatened or that you were trying to sway me to your side of the argument, though I was trying draw out a more clear outlining of your position from you.
There’s no reason you should apologise for taking the debate to a whole new level, unless of course it irritates the original poster that the original topic has been so deviated from. 
No worries. As long as you’re this civilised about it, there’s no problem.
While I like the sentiment behind your idea of science and religion being compatible, I have to disagree. By saying that, I don’t mean they should compete. I just mean they are completely different things that work on entirely different concepts and thoughts.
It’s like trying to prove a formula by writing an opera.
When I got into astrophysics I got some basic ways of trying to get rid of my ideas of believing in god, my English is not superb so don’t mind that, anyway let me share them (I am not trying to start a flamewar, if you respond keep it cool).
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If you pray, how will god hear you when soundwaves won’t even reach the end of our atmosphere.
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If you are thinking about him, how would your ‘signal’ ever be heard when even with lightspeed (which is the highest possible speed possible in our universe) it can take billions of years to reach a distant place in the universe.
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If god is always everywhere then the universe must be infinitly large, which it isn’t because we can see it increase in size (blue/red shifting of galaxies) discovered by Edwin Hubble.
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God cannot be ‘outside’ the universe, because ‘outside’ our universe there is no time nor any dimensions, dimensions are measurements.
No dimensions means there cannot be mass, because every particle has 3 dimensions.
Without time there cannot be an event, because it had to happen on a certain point in time, but there is no time. -
If God was eternal then why was the universe formed in a ‘Big Bang’ - if our universe is increasing in size then it must have been smaller in the past, eventually crushing all matter back into one point (a singularity as seen in black holes, an infinitly dense point on an infinitly small scale).
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If the Earth was created 6000 years ago, howcome we can see so many planets form around us just like our Earth was formed.
Massive stars that have fused lighter elements into heavier elements explode in a supernova, spreading all their material in space.
Gravity forms a new smaller star from this material (like the Sun) and the heavier elements are also brought together by gravity and form planets like the Earth.
The heavier elements produced by the extremely heavy star are right below our feet, everything you touch and everything you eat/drink was created 5 billion years ago in the core of a super-massive star at temperatures reaching 150,000,000 degrees.
Gold is rare because stars cannot get warm enough to produce this, infact gold is only formed when the actual explosion occures - only at that point it is warm enough and is the pressure high enough to form gold. -
If God was in any way to effect our lives then his ‘body’ must be made from matter, but there is no such matter, if god is not made from matter then he doesn’t exist.
Ofcourse always when I post this kind of stuff, they always ask me the question we all hate; then how did our universe begin.
This is only speculation, but some people believe it started from an infinitly dense singularity, as seen in black holes.
Asking how the singularity got there is pointless because ‘it’ doesn’t follow the rules of nature nor does it have space-time dimensions.
The particle accelerator from CERN (yes the ‘black hole’ machine) was made to find out how our universe was 1 billionth of a second AFTER the Bing Bang, the question is still unanswered because we cannot do more then speculate about what happend in that very first billionth of a second.
I am not just throwing some random Wikipedia stuff at you, this stuff is supported by many pictures and observations or extremely complex mathematics.
Without getting back into it myself, I must say I’m astounded at the level of tolerant, informed and reasonable debate on this, one of the most notoriously flame-attracting topics on the internet. Atheists, agnostics, and religious types alike let us all take a moment to bask in the glow of our extreme maturity and brotherhood.
…And now I’ve made myself sick, so excuse me while I go find another thread to say something horribly cynical, sarcastic and demeaning to a fellow human being, possibly in the form of extreme mockery.
It’s not just a counter point.
This is the key link that COMPLETELY DISPROVES religion.
This is the thing they have been telling us to find to prove it.
I think you’re overstating that a bit. For one thing, it’s impossible, logically to prove a negative. There can never be such a thing as proof that a supreme being doesn’t exist, there can only be either some proof (not found yet), or a lack of proof (which we have) that he DOES exist. But lack of proof of existence is not proof of non-existence.
Any religious types who have held up the lack of evidence of a common ancestor between man and other primates as evidence of any religious viewpoint can quite easily just now move the debating goalposts. After all they can say that there’s no positive evidence that we evolved from that creature or that God didn’t just create the fossil to test their faith or some other such silliness.
You guys are doing the exact same thing that Creationists do when they attempt to impose religious tests on science. You can’t prove or disprove religion with science, and you can’t prove or disprove science with religion. Its simply not in the same realm.
I’ll readily admit to googling that reference. Well played.
I read one of his books once, but not much sank in other than an amusing true story about a trial once held to find wood worms guilty of deliberately eating through a chair so that a priest would fall, bang his head and ‘be rendered into a state of idiocy’.
Yes but astrophysics is real, everything is observed and proved not only by observation but also by mathematics.
Many technologies on the Earth are made thanks to astronomy and astrophysics.
Germany is already building the first nuclear fusion plant (the process in stars which creates heavier elements and light/heat).
If we manage to get nuclear fusion under controll we could build a few of these facility’s in Africa and give all people electricity, this is because nuclear fusion gives us almost limitless energy because it doesn’t require stuff like gas or uranium.
You can power a house for a year with a glass of water and 4 rocks, thanks to nuclear fusion, energy would no longer be a problem on this planet.
If anyone is interested in this technology you can find YouTube videos about this subject.
I think science is able to prove certain religion’s gods false, but not a god.
For instance we could eventually prove jesus wasn’t real, or didn’t do the things he did, etc.
But I for one think that if there is a god, it wouldn’t be any one outlined by any religion we have thus far.
All of this is very true, but when you try to apply it to metaphysics you get arguments with huge logical holes like the ones in your previous post.
‘holes’ ?
“holes” as in: your logic isn’t solid, it has gaps, or holes in it, by which it can be disproven. For example when you say a god can’t hear you pray because the fastest your thoughts could travel is lightspeed, you are assuming that your god is physically hanging out somewhere in the distant universe. And you are also assuming that “thoughts” are governed by the same principles as physical matter. And even if all of your ridiculous assumptions are granted to be fact, you are ignoring quantum entanglement, which may or may not prove that information can travel faster than light speed.
Thoughts DO follow the same principles as physical matter, since they’re nothing but electrical pulses going through our brain.
Good point.
But then you have to get into the speed of telepathy… lol