God
- Thread starter matt182
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I choose atheist. Although, I don't think you should have the evolution thing after it since not believing in a god doesn't necessarily mean believing in evolution.
Why don't I believe in a god? Cause it's none of your business!!!
lol, just kidding (not going to be like Silent). Honestly I think religion was just something created by society to keep people in check.
~Nicole
Why don't I believe in a god? Cause it's none of your business!!!
lol, just kidding (not going to be like Silent). Honestly I think religion was just something created by society to keep people in check.
~Nicole
I don't believe in the conventional God at all. I'm probably best described as Agnostic when it comes to my thoughts on God. My philosophy on life, which I think is more important than my philosophy on God, is more Buddhist than anything.
I agree with you though -- the concept of God or a higher power has been with us throughout time and continues to play a role in our lives.
I agree with you though -- the concept of God or a higher power has been with us throughout time and continues to play a role in our lives.
I dont beleive in a conventional god either. Einstein himself said that if he had to pick a religion it would be buddahism, i forgot the exact reason but it was brilliant.
Theres so many things in this universe that we have no clue about which are soo interesting, are brains are you could say handicapped beyond the unimaginable and unthinkable, quite extraordianary.
But yeah i have strong belief over darwins theory of evolution. I think a lot of people doo beleive in god mainly because of the comfort they feel with themselves, even though comfort and truth are two entirely different things.
Theres so many things in this universe that we have no clue about which are soo interesting, are brains are you could say handicapped beyond the unimaginable and unthinkable, quite extraordianary.
But yeah i have strong belief over darwins theory of evolution. I think a lot of people doo beleive in god mainly because of the comfort they feel with themselves, even though comfort and truth are two entirely different things.
Has anyone ever seen god? No. Hence he/she/it does not exist. I prefer scientific fact than something that people "believe" in and all signs point to evolution being pretty obvious and not just with humans but with all animals.
Exactly, which is all the more reason for me to find it hard to believe in
Just because it's ambiguous?
Some would call the probability and existance of the atoms of water in a glass, "God".
It's all about interpretation...simply wanting to believe or disbelieve isn't really a good answer in itself. Most of us rationalize much more than that
Which brings me to another point...I think (whether we know it or not), that many of us start at:
"I want to believe,"
or
"I don't want to believe,"
And build from there. A pretty far shot from objectivity, but some of us make up some interesting connections...
Some would call the probability and existance of the atoms of water in a glass, "God".
It's all about interpretation...simply wanting to believe or disbelieve isn't really a good answer in itself. Most of us rationalize much more than that
Which brings me to another point...I think (whether we know it or not), that many of us start at:
"I want to believe,"
or
"I don't want to believe,"
And build from there. A pretty far shot from objectivity, but some of us make up some interesting connections...
It didn't take long before someone brought this down to semantics!
All the major world religeons revolve around a God that is;
1) Sentient
2) Omnipotent
3) Omniscient
If we take those three words as being included in the description of a 'Conventional God' as the original question stated then you can't really classify the atoms in a glass of water as God
Lol, sorry but that is obsurd. I agree that there probably isn't a God but your reasoning is lacking greatly.
I don't beleive in life after death but that's because I think our consciousness is held within the brain and that dies when we stop breathing; I don't think it's because my Grandad stopped calling after we buried him.
If God did exist he wouldn't be hanging around on Earth and therefore we would never see him
You fail to take into account that I was referring to a "God" in general in that post. I wasn't talking about a conventional God and if Streamline was, he wasn't being specific. Some believe God to exist, but subscribe to the "watchmaker" theory, and therefore believe God to be non-omniscient.
Fair enough, you weren't answering the original question as such so I apologise but I think it's good to add a bit more definition to the debate anyway.
However, I have another theory that's relatively new and gaining credibility for all of you who need scientific backing in order to believe. WE are God.
Read the experiment at the bottom, if they get that to work then I might start to give this idea a lot more credit
Here's the science bit
Did we reach back to shape the Big Bang?
If retrocausality is real, it might even explain why life exists in the universe -- exactly why the universe is so "finely tuned" for human habitation. Some physicists search for deeper laws to explain this fine-tuning, while others say there are millions of universes, each with different laws, so one universe could quite easily have the right laws by chance and, of course, that's the one we're in.
Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, suggests another possibility: The universe might actually be able to fine-tune itself. If you assume the laws of physics do not reside outside the physical universe, but rather are part of it, they can only be as precise as can be calculated from the total information content of the universe. The universe's information content is limited by its size, so just after the Big Bang, while the universe was still infinitesimally small, there may have been wiggle room, or imprecision, in the laws of nature.
And room for retrocausality. If it exists, the presence of conscious observers later in history could exert an influence on those first moments, shaping the laws of physics to be favorable for life. This may seem circular: Life exists to make the universe suitable for life. If causality works both forward and backward, however, consistency between the past and the future is all that matters. "It offends our common-sense view of the world, but there's nothing to prevent causal influences from going both ways in time," Davies says. "If the conditions necessary for life are somehow written into the universe at the Big Bang, there must be some sort of two-way link."
-- Patrick Barry
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Retrocausality: Can the present affect the past?
Researchers have devised an experiment using laser light to demonstrate a property of quantum mechanics: That pairs of entangled photons show identical properties as either a wave or a particle. By using this knowledge, they hope to demonstrate how to influence an event that has already occurred.
1. A laser beam is directed into a crystal that makes two streams of photons.
2a. One stream of photons travels through a screen with two slits.
2b. The other stream of photons travels through an identical screen with two slits BUT is routed through six miles of fiber-optic cable that delays the light by microseconds.
3a. A detector captures the light and records it as a wave-like or particle-like photon (you don't know which yet).
3b. The delayed light is sensed by a movable detector. If the detector is closer to the lens it's recorded as a wave-like interference pattern. If its farther from the lens it is recorded as a particle.
What is happening here: By choosing to measure the delayed photon as either a wave or particle photon, the experimenter forces the other photon to appear in the same way - because they are entangled - even though it reaches the detector earlier.
Sources: John Cramer, University of Washington; NewScientist, Sept. 2006
Patrick Barry wrote this piece for the New Scientist, where it first appeared. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
However, I have another theory that's relatively new and gaining credibility for all of you who need scientific backing in order to believe. WE are God.
Read the experiment at the bottom, if they get that to work then I might start to give this idea a lot more credit
Here's the science bit
Did we reach back to shape the Big Bang?
If retrocausality is real, it might even explain why life exists in the universe -- exactly why the universe is so "finely tuned" for human habitation. Some physicists search for deeper laws to explain this fine-tuning, while others say there are millions of universes, each with different laws, so one universe could quite easily have the right laws by chance and, of course, that's the one we're in.
Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, suggests another possibility: The universe might actually be able to fine-tune itself. If you assume the laws of physics do not reside outside the physical universe, but rather are part of it, they can only be as precise as can be calculated from the total information content of the universe. The universe's information content is limited by its size, so just after the Big Bang, while the universe was still infinitesimally small, there may have been wiggle room, or imprecision, in the laws of nature.
And room for retrocausality. If it exists, the presence of conscious observers later in history could exert an influence on those first moments, shaping the laws of physics to be favorable for life. This may seem circular: Life exists to make the universe suitable for life. If causality works both forward and backward, however, consistency between the past and the future is all that matters. "It offends our common-sense view of the world, but there's nothing to prevent causal influences from going both ways in time," Davies says. "If the conditions necessary for life are somehow written into the universe at the Big Bang, there must be some sort of two-way link."
-- Patrick Barry
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Retrocausality: Can the present affect the past?
Researchers have devised an experiment using laser light to demonstrate a property of quantum mechanics: That pairs of entangled photons show identical properties as either a wave or a particle. By using this knowledge, they hope to demonstrate how to influence an event that has already occurred.
1. A laser beam is directed into a crystal that makes two streams of photons.
2a. One stream of photons travels through a screen with two slits.
2b. The other stream of photons travels through an identical screen with two slits BUT is routed through six miles of fiber-optic cable that delays the light by microseconds.
3a. A detector captures the light and records it as a wave-like or particle-like photon (you don't know which yet).
3b. The delayed light is sensed by a movable detector. If the detector is closer to the lens it's recorded as a wave-like interference pattern. If its farther from the lens it is recorded as a particle.
What is happening here: By choosing to measure the delayed photon as either a wave or particle photon, the experimenter forces the other photon to appear in the same way - because they are entangled - even though it reaches the detector earlier.
Sources: John Cramer, University of Washington; NewScientist, Sept. 2006
Patrick Barry wrote this piece for the New Scientist, where it first appeared. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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Einstein quotes on Buddhism:
Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and spritual; and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. -Albert Einstein
If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism. -Albert Einstein
A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compasion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
-Albert Einstein
One thing that has always got me is that: If God created everything 'equally' and is all loving, then what gives humans the right to think that it is only them who go to 'Heaven' or 'Hell'. Based on that, you could argue that killing animals was classified as 'murder' and in that case we are all in deep ****, when judgement day arrives. So that would make the theory that we are all souls, trapped in a body, plausible for a good reason. Perhaps, every living being has a soul, just different bodies. When we die, in order to all truly be equal we have to all have something in common and that could be the very idea of a 'soul'. This would unite the people who died at any age. But then comes the problem, what would we all look like? And how mature would we be? What age would we be? If we could chose what we looked like in the afterlife then everybody would pick a good looking person with eternal youth. Then again, going to an 'eternal' life at a young age wouldn't matter because you would age, but then on that basis you would have to stop ageing, correct?
Stop and think to yourself, right now, could I live forever, do I want to? If you think about what 'eternity' means, it dawns on you. You will never truly be at peace. Even if heaven was nightclubs everyday with fun everywhere. Sooner or later you say 1,000,000,000,000 years, you would have done everything, literally. Then what? It never ends.
This kind of links to my opinion on religion. Human beings are scared of dying. They are scared of not existing. We are a fairly fearful race, we can't bear the thought of dying. Imagine being sick with no hope of recovery, or going to fight a battle with no hope of survival. People back from our very creation need something to make them feel comfortable. And yes, as somebody has already stated, religion is also a damn good way of controlling people.
So to my answer. I am an athiest.
Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and spritual; and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. -Albert Einstein
If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism. -Albert Einstein
A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compasion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
-Albert Einstein
One thing that has always got me is that: If God created everything 'equally' and is all loving, then what gives humans the right to think that it is only them who go to 'Heaven' or 'Hell'. Based on that, you could argue that killing animals was classified as 'murder' and in that case we are all in deep ****, when judgement day arrives
. So that would make the theory that we are all souls, trapped in a body, plausible for a good reason. Perhaps, every living being has a soul, just different bodies. When we die, in order to all truly be equal we have to all have something in common and that could be the very idea of a 'soul'. This would unite the people who died at any age. But then comes the problem, what would we all look like? And how mature would we be? What age would we be? If we could chose what we looked like in the afterlife then everybody would pick a good looking person with eternal youth. Then again, going to an 'eternal' life at a young age wouldn't matter because you would age, but then on that basis you would have to stop ageing, correct?Stop and think to yourself, right now, could I live forever, do I want to? If you think about what 'eternity' means, it dawns on you. You will never truly be at peace. Even if heaven was nightclubs everyday with fun everywhere. Sooner or later you say 1,000,000,000,000 years, you would have done everything, literally
. Then what? It never ends. This kind of links to my opinion on religion. Human beings are scared of dying. They are scared of not existing. We are a fairly fearful race, we can't bear the thought of dying. Imagine being sick with no hope of recovery, or going to fight a battle with no hope of survival. People back from our very creation need something to make them feel comfortable. And yes, as somebody has already stated, religion is also a damn good way of controlling people.
So to my answer. I am an athiest.
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ahh i see you found the quotes i was refering to by einstein
Interesting to see no one yet is a beleiver in here.
I too find that interesting. Just out of interest, are there any statistics on the amount of people practising religion now, compared to say 10 years ago? Would be interesting to see.
One thing that has always got me is that: If God created everything 'equally' and is all loving, then what gives humans the right to think that it is only them who go to 'Heaven' or 'Hell'. Based on that, you could argue that killing animals was classified as 'murder' and in that case we are all in deep ****, when judgement day arrives
Again, I have no belief in God but please read the following in answer to your question
Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. Like plant vegetation [which I permitted to Adam], I have now given you everything.... Only of the blood of your own lives will I demand an account. (Gen. 9:3, 5)