How many of you are atheists?

[Balti]

Atheism is all well and good for those that don't believe 'God' exists, but for a civilised life for all of us, there is nothing wrong with the 10 commandments.

You know, don't nick anything, don't kill anyone, that sort of thing.

It seems OK to me.

If you believe it, you believe it, and if you don't, you don't, but it would be a bit of a pisser if you got to the Pearly Gates and St Peter said 'No way, pal'.

Maybe I'm spreading my bets, but it seems easier to believe in it, and at the end of the day, no one can say the afterlife is bollocks or not.

Many in life will rebuke God and all He stands for, but will still want a white wedding in a church,

I have had a tough time over the last few years, and my belief in God has helped me cope.

It may be rubbish, it may be true, I don't know, but it has helped, and that's good enough for me.

Slag me off all you want, but I won't change my belief.

I don't care if it's irrational, maybe it is, but I have drawn a great deal of comfort from an inner belief that won't be shaken.

That's called Pascal's Wager and has two main problems.

1. If a God exists, I'm pretty sure that lip service to faith isn't the same as faith.

2. You have no idea if you're praying to the right God and might just be offending the proper God more and more.

It would be more logical to worship no Gods instead of possibly worshipping a false idol.

Fair enough, I take your points on board.

Like I wrote, I have an inner belief that God, or something, is out there.

I know you love your science and space travel, but can't you also accept that some of us, for whatever reason, believe He exists?

I don't know if He exists or not, it's my choice and if I'm wrong when I die and I face an eternity of nothing, then so be it.

All I was saying was that my belief has helped me cope, and it has. It has brought me comfort.

Science may, in your mind, give answers to everything, but in my mind, science doesn't solve everything, especially when you believe something like God exists.

The big bang happened, but who started it?

mebbe ''He'' had a sparkler or summat?

 

[Bill Walker]

It's like a goldfish trying to work out the internal combustion engine.
There are many things about the physical world about us that we don't understand , and many things that we have yet to understand , but none of the discoveries and none of the great works of scientists and visionaries from Leonardo da Vinci to Einstein have even come close to demonstrating the existence of a god or a creator or any form of supernatural intervention in the world as we know it.

Yes but..

Famous Scientists Who Believed in God

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/sciencefaith.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.godandscience.org/apologetic ... faith.html</a>

 

[burning blue soul]

It's like a goldfish trying to work out the internal combustion engine.
There are many things about the physical world about us that we don't understand , and many things that we have yet to understand , but none of the discoveries and none of the great works of scientists and visionaries from Leonardo da Vinci to Einstein have even come close to demonstrating the existence of a god or a creator or any form of supernatural intervention in the world as we know it.

Yes but..

Famous Scientists Who Believed in God

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/sciencefaith.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.godandscience.org/apologetic ... faith.html</a>

so, no one who died after 1955?

 

[hilts]

I am not talking about time and receiving messages before they are sent, i cant get my head around physical matter, something cannot have always have been there, things don't just appear

But they're the same thing. The idea that something needs a creator to appear is just a consequence of time running in one direction so to speak, and the fact that information cannot travel faster than light. There's no other reason that it has to hold true.

And you accept physical things just appearing all of the time without realising. Say you go and see a small tree in your back garden growing, then go back and look at it again in a month. Where did the physical extra wood come from to make the tree longer?

I never said things need a creator i have already stated i find this a insufficient answer, the tree analogy is not an analogy that solves my problem, a tree will grow from something, A+B creates C, my problem would be where did A and B come from, as a dullard everything happens by a reaction of some sort and we can strip everything down but at some point you had to go from absolute nothing to something and that is what i cannot grasp

Theories and experiments cannot help because as far as i am aware absolute nothing has never been seen or equated,

 

[Balti]

It's like a goldfish trying to work out the internal combustion engine.
There are many things about the physical world about us that we don't understand , and many things that we have yet to understand , but none of the discoveries and none of the great works of scientists and visionaries from Leonardo da Vinci to Einstein have even come close to demonstrating the existence of a god or a creator or any form of supernatural intervention in the world as we know it.

Yes but..

Famous Scientists Who Believed in God

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/sciencefaith.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.godandscience.org/apologetic ... faith.html</a>

so the last one in the list was was born in the 19th century?

yes that fits....

ancient geezers used to believe in ancient ideology that they were forced to learn at school .....

wow, how compelling....

 

[Bill Walker]

It's like a goldfish trying to work out the internal combustion engine.
There are many things about the physical world about us that we don't understand , and many things that we have yet to understand , but none of the discoveries and none of the great works of scientists and visionaries from Leonardo da Vinci to Einstein have even come close to demonstrating the existence of a god or a creator or any form of supernatural intervention in the world as we know it.

Yes but..

Famous Scientists Who Believed in God

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/sciencefaith.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.godandscience.org/apologetic ... faith.html</a>

so, no one who died after 1955?

Quote Stephen Hawking..

"Hawking writes "One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could still believe that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang. He could even have created it at a later time in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang. "

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.examiner.com/article/does-stephen-hawking-believe-god" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.examiner.com/article/does-st ... elieve-god</a>

 

[Balti]

Yes but..

Famous Scientists Who Believed in God

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/sciencefaith.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.godandscience.org/apologetic ... faith.html</a>

so, no one who died after 1955?

Quote Stephen Hawking..

"Hawking writes "One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could still believe that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang. He could even have created it at a later time in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang. "

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.examiner.com/article/does-stephen-hawking-believe-god" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.examiner.com/article/does-st ... elieve-god</a>

he could also say hello

if he existed

 

[Bodicoteblue]

Science is important and we need people with that mindset to understand our surroundings but simple people like me when they see an apple fall from a tree don't think why is that apple falling down, we just accept it does, what we wonder is where the apple came from, a tree, okay where does the tree come from the earth etc.. and this goes on and on and on

Every answer just leads to another question, everything has an origin so what started it all, this is the point where your head hurts and you just decide it is better to leave it alone

You make a very valid point , but we ask the questions about where the apple or the tree came from - fair questions but again whatever question you ask , the answer will never logically lead you to a deity or creator.
Biology and genetics will give you the answers - logical and rational .
The questions to which we have not got the answers will be answered in time by the advancement and the accumulation of knowledge which will further push back the constraints of ignorance , just as has happened in the past

You misunderstand i find the creator answer as baffling as anything else and we will not find the final answer certainly not in our lifetime and probably never. there is a limit to what we can achieve, we might not be near that yet but it will come

As human knowledge increases , the concept of a creator recedes .
It's not really baffling .Gods were and still are the personification of illogicality, It's like ghosts or fairies , if you don't have a logical explanation to hand for a phenomenon then obviously it has to be attributable to something illogical. Illogicality cannot be reasoned with , it exists outside of intelligent thought -this is how religion survives , the promulgation of irrationality and the constant hope of not being disproven.
Scientific discovery and advancement disproves the unsophisticated and indeed rather crude methods of thinking that created and sustains religion and the concept of creators and gods . The fact that all of the gods from Ancient Greece to the advent of Christianity and the Muslim and Jewish faiths were all created in a time of scientific ignorance is no surprise. Nobody has created a god since.
Is there a limit to what we can achieve ? We are only constrained by our own lack of knowledge . At the start of the 20th century, we couldn't conceive of powered flight - within 20 years we had it , within 70 years we had men on the moon,
In living memory our most advanced communication systems were the telephone connected by miles of wires , and here we are talking to each other on the internet. As knowledge increases , our capacity for more knowledge increases
- it's self sustaining .
When they were ignorant , our ancestors created gods , with enlightenment and education we are now creating wonderful and awful things - it's all part of human evolution .

 

[-nibz-]

At the end of the day we know fuckall in the way fuckall is known ie we know fuckall.

 

[GratefulDawg]

Count me in. Religion is one big waste of time.

How much time have you personally wasted on it mate ?

As long as it took for the priests to bum him

Nah, I grew up Episcopal, not Catholic. We at least let our priests have spouses. Not a bad faith to grow up in, but I realized that I was only a Christian because I was born and raised in the States. Who was I to think we had the answers over some Buddhist from Tibet?

Perhaps it's different in England, but I've seen religion used for so much hatred over here that it completely turned me off.