Reason To be athiest?

Discussion in 'Religion Archives' started by RoadmapsToThere, Jul 4, 2012.

  1. Sarkus Hippomonstrosesquippedalo phobe Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    10,407
    Subjectively, "nothing" is the experience we have before we were conceived and after we die.
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

    Messages:
    39,426
    RoadmapsToThere:

    Being an atheist doesn't justify doing bad things, any more than being Muslim or Christian justifies doing bad things. And you can't opt out of morality simply by saying "I don't believe in God."

    Those people probably don't know what atheism is, or what wearing a cross really symbolises. To them, image is everything, but they don't know anything. Having other people think you're cool seems like a really important thing at school (and later on, too, I guess), but your actions are always ultimately more important than your image.

    I am interested, though. Can you tell me why these people think atheism is cool?
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. RoadmapsToThere Registered Member

    Messages:
    4
    I personally am an Athiest because i see no proof or evidence of any devine being in control of human life. I have spoken to people asking them why they are athiest and have had replies of legit reasons, such as no proof.. Some people whom i have spoken to have said such reasons as: "religeon sounds stupid, i dont want people dictating my life" or "religeon doesnt support my sexuality preference"
    These reasons dont seem like they are reasons, these sound like excuses just to live how they want and have no respect for religeon..
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. Crunchy Cat F-in' *meow* baby!!! Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,423
    Religion is no more an excuse than non-religion. It'sreally not a factor and certainly doesn't "deserve" any respect (considering it isn't a life form either).
     
  8. The Marquis Only want the best for Nigel Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,562
    You're obviously American. You'd be surprised how little other western countries really care about god, or what wearing a cross is supposed to signify.

    Having said that, amongst documented and verified cases of Feral Children, those who are captured and re-educated into the world of Man display an almost complete lack of ability to even begin understanding religion or god. Do some reading. "Feral" children are one of the best ways to distinguish between that which is construct and instinct.

    That is probably one of the greatest proven arguments against religion I know of, and a firm indicator that the concept of god, whether in terms of organised religion or the "personal god" cop out I read so much of these days, is an entirely human invention and passed from man to man by word of mouth, upbringing, and embraced through a sense of belonging... whether that be to convention or rebelliousness.
    Social "rebels", to make a point, generally identify with others of their own ilk; it's up to you to make the distinction between rebelliousness and true independant thought.

    Your question, given these points, should be rather "Reason to be Theist" rather than the other way around. You've got it all backwards.
     
  9. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    6,493
    "Reason to be Theist" I like that. But I'd be willing to bet most theist never give it a thought.
     
  10. Merlijn curious cat Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,014
    I think you're cutting some corners there. How can you be sure that a true 'feral' child did not have his/her instincts suppresed by some other constructs?

    Also, making constructions may be a human instinct.
     
  11. The Marquis Only want the best for Nigel Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,562
    Such as? What, the dogs/wolves/badgers/eagles told them god doesn't actually exist?
    Are you actually positing that Feral Children have the concept of god repressed? Ok. But you're seriously going to have to back that up. Paticularly when you consider that many of them are under the care of people who wish to bring it out and have completely failed to do so.

    Well, of course they are. Isn't that the point?
    That you refer to them as "constructs" is an argument in itself, is it not?
    A construct is artificial. Yes?
     
  12. Merlijn curious cat Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,014
    I do not pose anything, especially not that a concept of god is innate. I only wanted to point out that the 'feral child'-argument is very tricky.
    For example, how can you be sure that the behaviour of feral children is instinct-driven? Is it completely impossible that such a being has made constructs by himself?
    yes, I think that is the point.
    I am not certain about that.
     
  13. kx000 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,137
    I just am, couldn't change it if I wanted to.
     
  14. The Marquis Only want the best for Nigel Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,562
    Crap.
     
  15. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    54,036
    You need to read The God Delusion! We don't need an excuse, religious is bunk and you should live how you want. If religion wants respect, it has to earn it the same way science does, but producing verifiable results.
     
  16. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    6,493
    Bet you can't watch the following video without :roflmao::bravo::worship:

    If Atheists Acted Religious
     
  17. kx000 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,137
    How is believing in anything that has yet to be deemed false be retarded? Does a Christian really believe every sentence in the bible? If faith is a useful emotion then I, or you, or they will always believe in the correct answer, its only a mater of recognizing which choice faith is behind. How can someone possibly believe gay people automatically go to hell? The bible states God created all things, gay people included, why create them gay?

    What is your evidence against the existence of God, those who claim to know he does not exist?

    And people who claim to know God, what is your evidence for him?

    Biblical evidence is disqualified on the ground of integrity.
     
    Last edited: Jul 6, 2012
  18. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,028
    Already gave it. You didn't undo it; you didn't replace it; you didn't do anything.
     
  19. kx000 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,137
    What is your model as to the evolution of the universe, Sci?

    What was first? The shell? Or something else?
     
  20. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    6,493
    Your asking me to provide evidence for a negative. I don't think it works that way. However, why are there so many religions all believing in a different God? Actually, if God were really to exist, all he would have to do is ask me to believe. But surely if he existed we wouldn't be having this conversation would we?
     
  21. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,028
    Yes, until an idea can be shown, there's not much use of worrying about it or what it is said to go on to do. The best that comes out of it is to spur deeper scientific cosmological investigations.
     
    Last edited: Jul 7, 2012
  22. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,028
    Ah, good, an easy question, one much easier than a final exam that asks one to write the complete history of the Popes, on the spot.


    Big Bang researchers suggest ‘symmetry’ as a basis for the universe, and we might note that a lack of anything has perfect symmetry. If the universe encompasses everything (time, space, and matter), nothing exists outside of it and therefore nothing existed before it, leading to a total baryonic number of zero. So, anyway, this symmetry has all of the forces being equal, with everything so hot and dense that matter cannot even form yet, nor spacetime, or at least it was the same everywhere, although twisted and convoluted—nor any separation yet; it was pure symmetry.

    Obviously the symmetry was broken, making for less ‘order’ and more chaos, the tendency being for ‘entropy’ to march on. Spacetime arrives when what is called ‘supergravity’ separates into the combined nuclear forces (strong, weak, electromagnetic) and gravitation. Matter makes its first appearance during this era as just a composite form, called Grand Unified Theory or GUT matter. GUT matter is a combination of what will become leptons, quarks, and photons. In other words, it contains all the superpositions of future normal matter. But, during the GUT era, it is too hot and violent for matter to survive in the form of leptons and quarks.

    Even though the baryon number is extremely small (10^-10), why isn’t it zero? In Nature, there are only three natural numbers, 0, 1 and infinity. All other numbers require explanation. What caused the asymmetry of even one extra matter particle for every 10 billion matter/anti-matter pairs?

    One answer is that the asymmetry occurs because the universe is out of equilibrium. This is clearly true because the universe is expanding, and a dynamic thing is out of equilibrium, for only static things are stable. There are particular points in the history of the universe when the system is way out of equilibrium, and those the symmetry breaking moments. And Noether’s conservation derivations, such as from time-translation, may lose their kilter if time alters from its point-of view invariance.

    Notice also that during the inflation era, any asymmetries in the microscopic world would be magnified into the macroscopic world. One such quantum asymmetry is CP violation As the Universe expands and cools the process of creation and annihilation of matter/anti-matter pairs slows down. Soon matter and anti-matter has time to undergo other nuclear processes, such as nuclear decay. Many exotic particles, massive bosons or mesons, can undergo decay into smaller particles. If the universe is out of equilibrium, then the decay process, fixed by the emergent laws of nature, can become out of balance if there exists some asymmetry in the rules of particle interactions. This would result in the production of extra matter particles, rather than equal numbers of matter and anti-matter, and we have one in 10 billion, for we know the photon count.

    In the quantum world, there are large numbers of symmetric relationships. For example, there is the symmetry between matter and anti-matter. For every matter particle, there is a corresponding anti-matter particle of opposite charge. In the 1960's, it was found that some types of particles did not conserve left or right-handedness during their decay into other particles. This property, called parity was found to be broken in a small number of interactions at the same time the charge symmetry was also broken and became known as CP violation.

    The symmetry is restored when particle interactions are considered under the global CPT rule (charge - parity - time reversal), which states that that a particle and its anti-particle may be different, but will behave the same in a mirror-reflected, time-reversed study. During the inflation era, the rapid expansion of spacetime would have thrown the T in CPT symmetry out of balance, and the CP violation would have produced a small asymmetry in the baryon number. This is another example of how quantum effects can be magnified to produce large consequences in the macroscopic world. CP violation, by itself, is not sufficient to resolve the matter/anti-matter asymmetry. However, it is an example of what may be a class of reactions that produce more matter than anti-matter. The sum of these reactions explains the baryon number.

    The discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) confirmed the explosive nature to the origin of our Universe. For every matter particle in the universe there are 10 billion more photons. This is the baryon number that reflects the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter in the early universe.

    Looking around the Universe its obvious that there is a great deal of matter. By the same token, there are even many, many more photons from the initial annihilation of matter and anti-matter.

    Most of the photons that you see with your naked eye at night come from the centers of stars. Photons created by nuclear fusion at the cores of stars then scatter their way out from a star’s center to its surface, to shine in the night sky. But these photons only make up a very small fraction of the total number of photons in the Universe. Most photons in the Universe are cosmic background radiation, invisible to the eye.

    Cosmic background photons have their origin at the matter/anti-matter annihilation era and, thus, were formed as gamma-rays. But, since then, they have found themselves scattering off particles during the radiation era. At recombination, these cosmic background photons escaped from the interaction with matter to travel freely through the Universe.

    As the Universe continued to expanded over the last 14 billion years, these cosmic background photons also ‘expanded’, meaning their wavelengths increased. The original gamma-ray energies of cosmic background photons has since cooled to microwave wavelengths. Thus, this microwave radiation that we see today is an ‘echo’ of the Big Bang.

    During inflation, the virtual particles of the pairs appearing got separated so quickly that they couldn’t annihilate, and so they went to be rather enduring.

    In sum, and in importance, spacetime separated from matter and the rest is history.
     
  23. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,028
    Central to the beauty of our theories of how the Universe works is symmetry, as expressed by Noether's theorem, a statement that for every continuous symmetry there exists a conservation law, these being invariance of the laws of Nature to spatial translation, temporal translation, and rotation, making for conservation of energy, mass and angular momentum. One symmetry that is not conserved is mirror symmetry. CP violation shows us that the Universe is chiral, a fancy word that means parity or handed-ness; the Universe distinguishes between left and right handed interactions; nature looks different in a mirror. Finding symmetries in a theory is important. Finding symmetries that a theory does not possess—a broken symmetry, is even more important.

    When dealing with particles and their interactions, global symmetry makes no sense, Why should the behavior of particles here on Earth have any effect on observations of particles on distant stars. Instead symmetry is restored through the use of a gauge field, a field that carries the information of symmetry around the universe. For example, by demanding that electromagnetism obey local gauge symmetry we are forced to accept the existence of electromagnetic fields and the massless gauge boson as the photon. Similar requirements on all quantum fields produces quantum electrodynamics (QED). Objects in uniform motion or acceleration must also obey the laws of nature, thus, imposing local symmetry on motion forces a new field, the gravitational field described by general relativity, to appear.

    The Standard Model is incomplete, as it does not specify the values of fundamental constants nor does it combine with gravity. Two possible avenues for extensions of the Standard Model are grand unified theories (GUTs) and supersymmetry (SUSY). To unify weak and electromagnetism we simply write down a theory with enough gauge symmetry to accommodate the four mediators bosons (photon, W+, W- and Zo). Through the use of the Higgs mechanism (where a general field fills the Universe in which particles can interact to acquire mass), we break the symmetry to get three massive bosons, W+, W-, Zo, and one massless boson, the photon. To unify gluons with the other sub-atomic force carriers we need a new, larger gauge symmetry to bring everyone together. A new symmetry would make the distinction between quarks and leptons go away, at least until the symmetry break; until then we have GUT matter.

    One consequence of quark/lepton symmetry is that protons, once thought to be stable, must decay under GUT. However, this is a problem for GUT, as current experiments have not been able to detect proton decay and its half-life must be greater than 10^32 years. We are also unable to experiment at the GUT level as we would need to force quarks within a radius of 10-31 meters in order to exchange a GUT boson. This would require energies on the order of 10^15 GeV which is 10^13 times greater than our current technology. But, ultimately, GUT fails due to the gauge hierarchy problem, the fact that the difference between the electroweak and GUT symmetry breaking points implies two difference masses for the Higgs boson (102 GeV vs. 1015 GeV) means the GUT is insufficient.

    To have a complete set of all possible spacetime symmetries, one symmetry is missing in the Standard Model. This would be the ability to transform particles into different particles, ones with different spin. This symmetry, called supersymmetry, transforms fermions into bosons and vice versa. Thus, the distinction between particles of matter, fermions, and particles of force, bosons, would blur. Evidence of supersymmetry would show us that Nature has utilized all mathematically consistent spacetime symmetries.
     

Share This Page