Does God exist?

I'm an Orthodox Christian and I was taught that God exist . I am also the biggest skeptic you can find and I possess depth of knowledge in physics , chemistry , biology and medicine . If i put all my scientific knowledge on one side I have no evidence that God exists , but then again I have no evidence to the contrary .

So I just chose to follow Talleyrand's philosophy : "If God doesn't exist and i don't believe i lose nothing , if God doesn't exist and I believe i lose nothing . If God exist and I believe I will gain , but if God exists and I don't believe i loose big time . "

So I believe God exists , I have nothing to loose for believing and I still live my life how I want it .

The only scientific evidence that I can bring to support God's existence is a question : How do you explain the sentience of matter ?

 

You have the capacity to make yourself believe something? All you are doing if you follow this ridiculous pascals wager is lying to yourself. And, ironically, if god exists, he will know you are lying - And that's assuming you picked the right god out of the thousands that have been invented.

It's the equivalent of thinking you have a disease and telling yourself you don't, on the grounds that that is what you would prefer. Don't call yourself a skeptic after admitting to such ridiculous logic.

 

I think you mean Blaise Pascal?

 

lets explore this:

lets say that in the near future humans are able to fly to different planets in the universe. lets say a group of space explorers went to a far away planet from earth. on this planet which had been know no human had gone to before, they found a very complex machine.
now what is the best, safest explanation about how this machine came to be there on this planet?

1. the machine made itself (implies no designer)
2. possible humans made it (implies a designer)
3. someone other than humans made it (implies a designer)

i do think that answers 2 and 3 are more logical than 1. same thing applies with earth and living creatures. there is likely a designer of the cosmos. Whatever it is, we call it God. now that some of us come to that conclusion, lets find out what God wants from us...

Hi, i am a Christian and do believe that the God of the bible is the true God... besides faith there are facts, fulfilled prophecies, and more... some of which atheist do not validate, but i can say otherwise...

God bless all

 

Gerinja:

That design fallacy doesn't help at all, because you then just move to the "Who designed that designer?" question. All that trick does is kick the can down the street.

 

very famous catch phrase: "Who created God?" the answer i believe is nothing created God, because he is the ultimate being... could be that my answer might be wrong about there being a creator for God, but does it matter to us as much as my first post. all your question does is deviate from topic.... no win Mr. Will Spencer

Believe in Jesus!

 

And you don't see the logical flaw in claiming everything needs a beginning, then making the agent responsible for the beginning invalidate the very "rule" that required it's invokation?

Like was said before, you aren't explaining it, you are just kicking the can further down the road.

 

No i don't mean Pascal's bet. Talleyrand refines Pascal basis and turns it into something that is easy to apply . I picket it up from an book about the great diplomat . And God knows that my faith is not pristine but he might forgive me for that .

 

There is no doubt that God exists. In different areas of the world in different form and by different names he is called. He is also prayed in different manner. But God do exist. Without his desire nothing can happen on this planet.

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In time to come you will get darshan of your beloved god.

 

So no child gets molested without your god "desiring" it?
No child contracts a painful terminal disease without your god "desiring" it?
No old age pensioner gets beaten to death in their own home for £5 without your god "desiring" it?
The fact that i have just put your in your place means your god "desired" it?

What a utterly disgusting and grossly incompetent god you worship.

 

I am being pushed to the conclusion that a significant portion of the "human" population is simply incapable of rational thought -- even to the point where it is impossible to explain to them what rational thought is. At one time I believed that cultural norms motivated these people to purposefully ignore rational thought, but I am no longer certain. I am starting to think that it is just not possible for them, any more than it would be for a house cat to learn the rules of chess.

 

is the existence of God incompatible with suffering in the world? in some of our minds we just have to eliminate the existence of God because he does not measure up to our standards! meaning we'd like to think that God will only have created happy people in happy situations and happy everything for us! we really deserved it... what a world would that have been!! ignoring that devil, demons, and evil exist too. i got an idea, lets blame God for all the evil in the world. surely we do not want to experience pain and learn from it right? our needs come first. if all suffering in the world does not stop then,,, there is no God... sorry...

Now i am really thinking like a rational person huh? yey for me!

 

The presence of suffering doesn't eliminate a god, it does eliminate an all loving one though. Because what he would be doing is the equivalent to a parent standing by and watching their children get raped only to tell them after the ordeal that they deserved it. Does that sound loving to you? Seriously, does it?

 

Gerinja, doesn't saying you are a Christian replace the Creator for a religion?

Would a God that has expelled man for the purpose of remittance accept in return someone who simply reads a book as the extent of their redemption.....isn't it the goal to find the answer yourself - without Jesus the religion being itself a falsehood in light of the original commandment?

 

Uhhh... no...

 

The logic you use in your argument cannot extend beyond the allegory's boundaries. What you've created there is a classic example of a "straw man argument": showing reasonable logic relevant to that only within the argument itself, while attempting to use it as a parallel with another argument in order to impose the same conclusion.

I assume you're a proponent of intelligent design and have read of the 'blind watchmaker' and have, oh so cleverly, created your own interpretation.

I'd love to hear these 'facts' and supposed fulfilled prophecies. Did you know Nostradamous predicted all the modern wars?

I wish I thought as simplistically as you do, it must be a very carefree life.

 

I'm sure it's a fallacy, but I'm not sure it's a straw man fallacy.

The Three Fallacies of Teleology has some interesting things to say about this, but I don't find them ultimately satisfying.

Here's a more brief and to the point answer from Yahoo Answers:

This is called the "Anthropic Principle," the idea that the universe looks like it was designed for life. This logical fallacy is known, variably, as a "False Analogy," or "The Watchmaker Fallacy" a "Teleological Fallacy" or a "Homunculus Fallacy/Infinite Regress Problem" I will explain the origins of each title:

1.) False Analogy: The person in question is trying to compare the universe to an object (a chair, watch, computer, etc.) that has been designed by an intelligent creator. The analogy does not fit because it makes the assumption that complexity must have been designed. There is no known physical law that states this much be the case, and indeed fails to take into account the vast and wonderful process of Natural Selection. Natural Selection, in fact, can cause complexity to arise out of simplicity, by virtue of complexity in many being more adaptive. It takes only the smallest of mutations, and if that mutation is adaptive, it will stick around. If the mutation is a tiny tiny tiny bit from simple to complex, so be it. That happens to, and we have a wealth of evidence showing it.

2.) Watchmaker Fallacy: Best debunked by Richard Dawkins in his book "The Blind Watchmaker," a Watchmaker Fallacy (a more specific version of the False Analogy) asserts that something that appears designed must have had a designer. Dawkins, demonstrating a plethora of evidence to the contrary, asserts that if we can consider life to have been "designed" by a "watchmaker" then the watchmaker had no foresight: humans can choke because our air and food pipes are so close together, we get back problems because we weren't originally meant to walk upright, we have vestigal organs like the appendix, tail bone, and pinky toe. There would be far more efficient ways to design a living creature if there were intelligence behind the design; evolution, however, only selects for what is good IN THE MOMENT, not looking ahead. It is, in that sense, a "Blind Watchmaker."

3.) Teleological Fallacy: Teleological refers to an argument concerning an endpoint, which is a misleading way of looking at things. You can look at the human arm and say "we have an arm because we were MEANT to have an arm in the end" (this would be teleological because it deals with the endpoint) or you can deal with more immediate reasoning, more of the Blind Watchmaker stuff; we have an arm because adaptations towards having an arm were advantageous in that evolutionary moment.

4.) Homunculus Fallacy/Infinite Regress: Originally referring to a "homunculus," a small little man in one's head watching a "screen" projected from the eyes (often interpreted as being a soul or something similar) it unfortunately begs the question of how the HOMUNCULUS is seeing. Does he have eyes? Does he have a head with another homunculus inside watching? If so, there is an infinite regress, a logical impossibility. (As a fun aside, cognitive psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists have resolved this dilemma by pointing out that vision is simply the way in which we interpret light signals. Vision is comprised of brain activity. The conscious part of our brains are made up of how we interpret brain signals. We "see" because that is our method of representing light waves in the visual spectrum.)

Applied to the creation of the universe, if you say that something complex MUST have had a designer, consider the following: Any being who can design an entire world must, himself, be very complex. If complexity REQUIRES a designer, then the world's creator, also, requires a designer. Luckily, complexity does NOT require a designer, so we can leave the "creator" out of the picture altogether. Natural selection does the job nicely without anything supernatural.​

 

Very interesting Will. I suppose an 'inverse-straw man' would be more applicable than just the former since using the analogy not to contradict, rather support an external argument, but yes, the 'watchmaker fallacy' seems most suited to Gerinja's statements.

 

I was taught that Santa Claus exists.

Questions are not evidence.

Sentience is just a label, a convenient way of looking at ourselves. In a few years, computers will appear sentient also. All "sentient" really means is "really $$%^#$ complex." Perhaps the quote should be "Any sufficiently advanced machine is indistinguishable from sentience." We're really just complex machines. We evolved to the point where we had enough CPU power to realize that we existed. "I compute, therefore I am." At that moment, humanity changed forever.

 

- Does that translate?

Natural Selection is the means for diversity, complexity etc. by virtue of altering established conditions however the process is incapable of producing results by virtue of random events without an origin.

Natural Selection produced the unique quality Van Gogh used in creating a Masterpiece - Natural selection can not produce ever the complexity of a painting without the intermediary by randomly mixing colors to create the same effect.

The Supernatural does exist and is the basis of life and exists by means of laws and principals that only a set path enables for the Everlasting. The path is offered to man by the Creator as a discovery and likewise denied by death as a choice.