Zone1 Is Atheism Depressing?

[forkup]

No. Not anything will do. It's yours to define. The Christian concept is that God is transcendent. In other words, beyond anything we can relate to as material beings. Beyond energy and matter. That God is more like mind. That God is every extant INCORPOREAL attribute of existence.

But it's YOUR perception/definition of God that matters, right? Because YOU can't possibly find the evidence YOU are looking for if YOU don't even have some perception of what YOU are looking for.

There's no set "definition", simply tests. And I can think of a million tests. It's also not how an argument works. I don't accept the God hypothesis, you do. It's on you to provide the evidence for it, since you feel you have good reason to believe it.

I just threw up a ball ten times, thinking I would believe in this omnipotent God. If he could stop it from falling.

The ball fell every time.

I brought up the double blind prayer study. That wasn't a random thing. It was set up by scientists testing if prayer have a benefitial effect on health. They found it provided no benefit better than random chance.

If God exists he doesn't provide evidence. As such as an hypothesis he's useless because the hypothesis isn't falsifiable.

 

[forkup]

You mean like the universe popping into existence defying the paired particle principle leaving behind a matter filled universe when it should have been just filled with radiation with the matter being inexplicably hard wired to produce beings that know and create?

We don't know it simply "popped into existence", there's other hypothesis that claim something else. We do know quite a lot of the process of how things are created. So it's not "inexplicable", it's been explained within the natural world.

I've played this game with you before. You consider anything that's unexplained as "evidence", for God. The God of the gaps argument. In truth, lack of evidence for one explanation is not evidence that another (supernatural) explanation is correct. It's an appeal to ignorance.

 

[forkup]

Wait, you think there will be DIRECT evidence of a creator? If you were a character in a sim would you expect to find DIRECT evidence of the programmer?

Sure. Why not. There's nothing preventing the programmer of my sim to insert the knowledge of him into my brain.

 

[forkup]

Of course not. I believe everyone is a material and spiritual being. But Forkup doesn't. He believes everyone is only a material being.

That's the only thing I have evidence for. Until I have a reason to believe otherwise I can only express, (extreme skepticism), for the spiritual. And the reason I'm skeptical is because there's actually people who offer rewards for anyone who can prove this "spiritual being", and no one is capable of passing the experiments for it.

 

[forkup]

Neither did I. I studied the evidence we have at our disposal (the creation and evolution of existence) to answer the question of was the universe created to produce intelligence intentionally? Or was it happenstance.

Apparently you started from the position that a Creator does not exist and back filled that position. That unless God gives you a sign of his existence, God cannot exist. I find this to be an illogical, anti-intellectual and disingenuous position. If you need for me to enumerate why, please let me know and I'd be happy to oblige.

I didn't backfill anything. Since I don't know how the universe was created and the evolution of existence has plenty of natural explanations within the confines of the natural world after it's initial stage, and quite a lot of circumstancial evidence to support a natural explanation before it.

I just don't jump to the conclusion you do. "I don't know, therefore God".

 

[frigidweirdo]

Atheism and agnosticism are depressing.

I am NOT saying atheists are wrong because atheism is depressing.

I am only suggesting atheism is a bleak philosophy.

Some quotes:

“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.” Bertrand Russell



“I know no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution of humanity, as it is set forth in the annals of history. Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than the other brutes, a blind prey to impulses, which as often as not lead him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence a terror and a burden, and fill his physical life with barren toil and battle.” Thomas Huxley



“Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian doctrines taught something very similar. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries. But man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind. We psycho-analysts were neither the first nor the only ones to propose to mankind that they should look inward; but it appears to be our lot to advocate it most insistently and to support it by empirical evidence which touches every man closely.” Sigmund Freud

Atheism is based on reality.

You might find making up some story about a loving God great, but then God killed all but 8 people in the Noah's Ark flood. That's pretty depressing to me. Religion makes people fear sex, kind of depressing to me.