Does anyone else feel this way about Christianity vs Islam?

I'm not sure how you go from "no origin of life theory makes sense to me" to "I do think there is a God."

I think you must mean that there is an origin of life theory that makes sense to you, and that is the theory that the origin of life is God. Which to me, isn't much of a theory at all, because it doesn't seem to tell us anything useful about God or about life. As you've found, to get the useful stuff you've then got to turn to conflicting and questionable accounts of uncertain origin and reliability about what God is and why he/she/it did and does stuff.

If no origin of life theory makes sense to you, isn't it reasonable to simply accept that you/we just don't know how life originated? Why do you need to settle for the "God did it" theory, with all the associated baggage? Why not keep an open mind unless and until a theory is found that does make sense?

 

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I do not have the problem stated: I do not follow any religion. One does not choose a religion: the religion chooses you. You should take the time to decide what YOU believe, and then find the religion that matches those beliefs; hence you JOIN a religion. You cannot force yourself to believe what a religion teaches because if you do not believe, then you do not believe.

 

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That would be true if that was the definition we agreed on for "the universe", but that is not the classical definition nor the one I had in mind. It normally refers to the material universe - the space we have access to and can study with observation. It is the reality in which cause and effect is observed; our realm of matter and energy.

So I assumed you were asking where this 'causal reality' comes from, to which the answer was 'outside causal reality' - from an eternal first cause outside space and time, where questions of origin are moot. Such questions are obviously not moot in our universe. So if you have in mind another realm that has a cause, a parallel universe perhaps (since there might be many), then it's again not the one I answered with.

In other words, I would agree with your definition of universe, as 'everything that exists', if you included an uncreated first cause in the definition, which avoids the fallacy of infinite regress. But as it stands, your definition sits with that fallacy, not mine. Until we're using the same definition, we'll keep misinterpreting each other.

Supernatural is the new natural. Belief in an eternal reality has always been quite 'natural' for many people - it's only since it became harder to believe that this reality could be eternal that a supranatural (in a plain scientific sense) origin had to be considered, in those terms. I'm not saying anyone will 'find God' by studying the first moments of Planck time (God would not be "there"), but by inference, somewhere, something has to have existed first, 'a ground for being'. Whether you want to think of that beginning as 'natural' or 'supernatural' depends on the limitations you place on the word. It might just be of a different nature - 'alternatural'

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You seem very certain there's no evidence for an eternal first cause - I think the whole existing universe is evidence for it - but you talk about finding an origin, so am I right to think you believe there is one?

Yet at the same time you're objecting because I think questions about God are reasonable?

Note that I have not speculated on the nature of the first cause or 'God'. As far as the argument goes, there might be many gods. But if there is something, anything, that points to the possibility of a creator to creation, then it definitely warrants further question and speculation. I think human history, saturated with religion as it is, points to the fact that nobody is content with leaving that mystery unexplored.

It's just that you seem to discount everyone who claim to have found something in their search. Is there a rule that says it has to be empirical knowledge? Don't get me wrong, it's a powerful tool. But is it the only way to access knowledge?

Thank God for the non-religious, right? Did you look up who did the first suicide bombings? And what a loss to civilisation human sacrifice was. Let's not bring Caesar, Stalin or Pol Pot up. No, the problem is a human one, not simply a religious or idealogical one. Pointing fingers at organised groups has been the beginning of all war and genocides.

Personally, I would be overjoyed if (multidimentional?) Secular Atheism as a group stepped up and began to demonstrate the alternative. Show the world what can be done without an ideology.

 

That's highly ironic, since the definition you're using for 'the universe' was used by medieval philosopher and theologian (double irony?) John Scotus Erigena, who defined the universe as 'everything that is created and everything that is not created' in De divisione naturae.

The modern definition I thought a naturalist such as yourself would assume is described in The American Heritage Science Dictionary (2005) as "The totality of matter, energy, and space, including the Solar System, the galaxies, and the contents of the space between the galaxies."

I don't know him, but it doesn't matter since I do believe in a single reality, which corresponds to your chosen definition of 'universe'. It includes the scientifically observable universe as well as its Creator.

Mostly sci-fi and RPGs, since English is my second language. I don't think we have anything like Ambassador College here. Maybe 'moot' only exists at savethewords.org or as a founder of 4chan, but all the more reason to use it. It was good enough for Tolkien.

You make too much of my little reductionism. There are two sides to this issue. One is the naturalistic fallacy that everything is subject to empirical verification (talking about using 'classical' words - the words are as ancient Greek as they are modern science). The method itself cannot support such a claim. Furthermore, logic suggests a first cause, even if we cannot prove or disprove it. Science as a field of study was itself born from the theological belief that there is a God who ordered the universe and that this created order lends itself to discovery. And in that same sense, like science started out as theology, naturalism started out as supernaturalism. Ongoing spontaneous generation was very scientific for 1800 years. It didn't require extraordinary evidence to prove, it was simply the accepted hypothesis.

For the past 200 years, naturalism has become a widely accepted (or at least assumed) hypothesis. But the alternative doesn't need to be an "invisible, illogical supernatural universe full of creatures and forces that capriciously meddle in the functioning of our universe." (The Romans believed such things, and Jews and Christians were counted among the "atheists" who thought it was ridiculous.) It can be something more reasonable than naturalistic fundamentalism, and judging from history, what seems like extraordinary evidence today is common sense tomorrow. I'm not proposing we go back to superstitious naturalism, I just think it's foolish to suppose naturalism is airtight because its tools predict so. It just looks too much like confirmation bias.

In short, that the natural (I'm glad you supplied the adjective) universe is a thermodynamically closed (exchanging energy but not matter with its surroundings) or isolated system (exchanging neither matter nor energy with its surroundings) does not mean it has no ground for existence, or that that such a ground has to be expressible in scientific rather than religious or metaphysical language. God might seem extraordinary from a scientific perspective, but it's not the only perspective that exists. As I said, metaphysical naturalism has only recently become a pervasive (or persuasive) worldview.

Perhaps. But the opposite is also true: just because something doesn't have a handy solution doesn't make it false. (And we've progressed a bit since Jung. Belief in the supernatural was also informed by life experience. It was how people made sense of the world, and it's a self-modifying process that we're still part of.)

How is placing "I've got it all figured out" in a high school physics book somewhere in the future different from what I'm doing in the present, except that you won't take responsibility for believing you know how it will play out in those physics books?

I don't believe the situation will be much different than today. People might know more about science and have a fuller understanding of nature, but they'll know more or less the same about God, with old and new arguments for and against.

The elementary level is all we've got, and if history is any indication, our knowledge will always be relatively elementary. Theology and philosophy has been very good at posing abstract models of thought as placeholders for real data. We are always feeding new data into old models, even while we're revising them. Being sensible means taking one's ignorance into account, because as you and I both know, barging ahead with cherished ideas often does more damage to civilisations than good.

I just happen think that the difference between a naturalistic context for humanity and a theological one shouldn't be underestimated. Metaphysical naturalism seems to me like an impoverished model, despite its obvious value and predictive success in the field of natural science. Supernaturalism has the same problem (as I witness from the animistic African religions around me). Neither sufficiently address the real spiritual needs human beings have. And until those needs are met, natural and spiritual poverty will remain.

 

Are you shopping around for a relgion but can't decide between the two?

As far as I can tell most of these rules are designed to benefit the very people making them up.

 

Why a God would need to have a religion?

 

Good question.. People need religion, that's why people invented it.

 

Religion forms around belief like culture around a country; it's inevitable.

It's good. It's bad. It's people.

 

Where did you get the idea that God needs religion or can have any needs at all.

 

i tend to agree on that.