Religion: Is it cool?

[Leopard]

I've wasted some TIME on this site but it wasn't in this Groove of a thread

[sunspot]

I feel like I'm wasting time, too.

There's one thing that I think I do have to clear up :

I find it ironic/amusing that religion aggressors come across just as, if not more, arrogant than the zealots that piss them off in the first place.

I don't know if you or anyone else thought I was trying to. It's not my intention to do so. I see how the below question may appear to show people as aggressive or arrogant:

What kind of evidence are you looking for? Bones? Fingerprints? What exactly?

Let me rephrase my question: what are we to look for in dealing with God if God does exist? What should we look for if God decided to leave a mark, what would it be? Would we see it as something that was tangible like fingerprints, bones, buildings, structures, writings, science, reason, people, what? If it's any of these, are we sure that we are correct?

Anything other than some words in a book.

I think there a some observations that could point us in a positive direction:

1) A more simplistic example is when I walk outside and observe nature, communication (human and otherwise), beauty, and gaze at the stars, I think of things like order, structure and intelligence.

2) More specifically, the human genome and the vast amount of information that our cells hold. I find it interesting that cells hold more information than any supercomputer that several people get together on and build, and still the supercomputer is not as complex as humans DNA. It would require purpose and intelligence to stack that much information in our DNA. Random events over millions of years would not provide this much information in human DNA let alone the sheer amount of precision that it's done with.

3) Our universe has a start. There is no such thing as something coming from nothing. I know this is a classical theistic approach for the existence of God, but I still think it's a very apt one that has a good amount of reason and science behind it. Scientifically speaking, there hasn't been any proven test that something comes from nothing unless there is some intelligence behind it.

4) The Anthropic Principle-- the Earth being fine tuned in several different factors to support existence. If any are off then our existence as humans ceases to be.

5) Humans are spiritual/religious creatures, not necessarily in the strict sense. People do things, try things, live out their life in an habitual manner trying to find meaning in life. Why do we do this? I think we are created by God with this propensity. Just like a t.v. with bad reception due to an misdirected antenna, I think are propensity for things that are religious/spiritual/habitual are misdirected. We often have a fuzzy picture of what things are and we stick to it.

These are just some minor observations, not going into great detail. I do think these should to weighed and tested. I do think there are some that are rooted in philosophy but are also scientific i.e., the Kalam Cosmological argument.

Even though you said, "Anything other than some words in a book," I still think that testing out these claims is beneficial. Maybe the ancients wanted us to know that God does exist and that's why they wrote it down. It doesn't have to be anything nefarious behind it, even though people have used religion has their scapegoat for bad; certain writings can be a positive thing. Maybe this is how God wants to communicate with us-- through words that we can look over and memorize.

Just throwing it out there.

[Frank Delicious]

4) The Anthropic Principle-- the Earth being fine tuned in several different factors to support existence. If any are off then our existence as humans ceases to be.

Did you know they just found another planet that the right conditions for life?

[jsun3thousand]

why do people automatically assume the earthly conditions are the only ones that can support life?

[Jerry R]

4) The Anthropic Principle-- the Earth being fine tuned in several different factors to support existence. If any are off then our existence as humans ceases to be.

This argument always amuses me. The universe was not tuned to meet our needs, we evolved to be able survive here. It's like if I dig a hole in my back yard and fill it with water on a freezing day. It's not a miracle that the next day there would be a block of ice in the hole that fit the hole perfectly. The water conformed to it's constraints.
Not to mention, if our universe is tuned, someone did a pretty shitty job as it's almost completely uninhabitable. Hell, a large percentage of the earth is pretty inhospitable. Terrible evidence for design...

[Roy]

Did you know they just found another planet that the right conditions for life?

They say this like every six weeks and then you never hear about it again.

I agree with Jsun... Human centrism is the reason they think it has to meet human criteria to support life.

[jubuttib]

Meh, us trying to prove that god exists is like Hamlet trying to prove that Shakespeare exists.

And yeah, the earth really is very inhabitable after all. Almost every species that has lived has died and the universe seems to constantly do everything in it's power to extinquish the last of us. Won't be long before the next ice age/warm period/asteroid comes along and totally f's everything up again. Surprised it hasn't happened already, we've been here for a while.

[Jerrod]

Anything other than some words in a book.

I think there a some observations that could point us in a positive direction:

1) A more simplistic example is when I walk outside and observe nature, communication (human and otherwise), beauty, and gaze at the stars, I think of things like order, structure and intelligence.

That is your mind overlaying order and structure on something you are observing. In other words it's an emotional response to something you don't fully understand, not evidence of anything. No different than something falling over when I am not looking and then blaming it on a ghost because I didn't see it fall over.

2) More specifically, the human genome and the vast amount of information that our cells hold. I find it interesting that cells hold more information than any supercomputer that several people get together on and build, and still the supercomputer is not as complex as humans DNA. It would require purpose and intelligence to stack that much information in our DNA. Random events over millions of years would not provide this much information in human DNA let alone the sheer amount of precision that it's done with.

Same reply as above. Just because nature and time pulled off something that we can't understand doesn't mean there is a god.

3) Our universe has a start. There is no such thing as something coming from nothing. I know this is a classical theistic approach for the existence of God, but I still think it's a very apt one that has a good amount of reason and science behind it. Scientifically speaking, there hasn't been any proven test that something comes from nothing unless there is some intelligence behind it.

Logic here doesn't work. First you say there is. Then you say "Scientifically speaking, there hasn't been any proven test that something comes from nothing unless there is some intelligence behind it.". Are you trying to say with some intelligence we can make something from nothing? No such thing as something from nothing is true under our current mathematical models, unfortunately those models breakdown when the universe is taken back to the moment of the big bang. In other words we don't know for sure what the laws of reality are just before a big bang (or inside a black hole) because our laws of reality don't work in the realm of a singularity.

4) The Anthropic Principle-- the Earth being fine tuned in several different factors to support existence. If any are off then our existence as humans ceases to be.

Anthropic Principle is just another idea and though it can be extrapolated to support creationism it can also simply imply that that universe exists because we are here to observe it. In any case it's not evidence of God, or anything really. Just a philosophical argument.

5) Humans are spiritual/religious creatures, not necessarily in the strict sense. People do things, try things, live out their life in an habitual manner trying to find meaning in life. Why do we do this? I think we are created by God with this propensity. Just like a t.v. with bad reception due to an misdirected antenna, I think are propensity for things that are religious/spiritual/habitual are misdirected. We often have a fuzzy picture of what things are and we stick to it.

That's cool but again just an opinion which proves nothing and is not verifiable in it's own right. Man's desire for God or meaning doesn't not prove the existence of anything other than the desire.

These are just some minor observations, not going into great detail. I do think these should to weighed and tested. I do think there are some that are rooted in philosophy but are also scientific i.e., the Kalam Cosmological argument.

Even though you said, "Anything other than some words in a book," I still think that testing out these claims is beneficial. Maybe the ancients wanted us to know that God does exist and that's why they wrote it down. It doesn't have to be anything nefarious behind it, even though people have used religion has their scapegoat for bad; certain writings can be a positive thing. Maybe this is how God wants to communicate with us-- through words that we can look over and memorize.

Just throwing it out there.

I can understand your comments about testing things and agree that we should investigate our universe as fully as possible. Please don't take any of the above criticisms personally.

[jsun3thousand]

i like finding charts that work with current threads.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662676/inf ... -got-wrong

[uNicedmeMan]

i like finding charts that work with current threads.

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662676/inf ... -got-wrong

Well, there went the last hour of my life. There is some cool stuff on that site.

[JHern]

1) A more simplistic example is when I walk outside and observe nature, communication (human and otherwise), beauty, and gaze at the stars, I think of things like order, structure and intelligence.

I see a mess, but governed by physical laws. But the laws themselves may be only an artifact of our perception and the way the mind has to organize data in order to perceive objects.

2) More specifically, the human genome and the vast amount of information that our cells hold. I find it interesting that cells hold more information than any supercomputer that several people get together on and build, and still the supercomputer is not as complex as humans DNA. It would require purpose and intelligence to stack that much information in our DNA. Random events over millions of years would not provide this much information in human DNA let alone the sheer amount of precision that it's done with.

Wrong. Hundreds of millions of years, and unimaginable amounts of trial and error, crude natural experiments, and here we are. Evolution is plain to see by all who simply open their eyes. The dynamical interplay of life with other life and the planet it lives on is pretty awesome, i agree, but certainly crude in many ways.

3) Our universe has a start....

Also wrong. The universe has no start, time is endless and beginningless. The big bang wasn't a beginning, we know there was something before that, it is detected as small fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. And before that there was something else, and before that something else, and so on. March back in time and you go towards a lower entropy state (much less interesting than after the big bang, and decreasing in interestingness back in time), but you can never reach zero entropy in a finite number of steps (forward, or backward, in time). There is no zero time, it simply doesn't exist, and nobody can infer its existence.

4) The Anthropic Principle-- the Earth being fine tuned in several different factors to support existence. If any are off then our existence as humans ceases to be.

We're lucky. But there are billions and trillions of trial planets out there (and more), so life is bound to get going on some planet that has habitable enough conditions. We just happen to be on one of them, and so it seems as if we're fortunate, although any life that pops up is bound to be fortunate.

5) Humans are spiritual/religious creatures...

A survival mechanism to help us cope with the fact that we can ask questions about our existence that might otherwise drive us mad or otherwise threaten our survival.

[Beetard]

Is it cool? Not really.

Like I said, I'm slightly wiser.

Thinking that I was destined for some eternal kingdom in the sky only served to prevent me from properly adjusting to life as we know it.

[Mr. Plow]

Let's rehash this again, shall we? Long live the Religion Thread!

[Timko]

I'll play.

I'm currently exploring the idea of becoming a Christian again after leaving the church at 16 (I'm 29 now). Here are a few highlights that I have found that I believe in.

1. Man is inherently broken.
2. Acceptance by God is through grace alone, not through any act or work you could commit.
3. Sin is attempting to hold anything in your heart (good or bad) above God. Doing so will only lead to disappointment later in life.

A close friend of mine gave me a book called "The Reason for God" about 6 months ago. She's a close friend, but I never had any desire to explore a religious or spiritual experience outside of myself. I have always believed in the existence of God, but it was a more philosophical existence. I started going to church with her (and a number of close friends) about 6 weeks ago, and have found quite a bit of comfort in the fact that I'm not responsible for fixing everything that's broken in the world. I finished the book she gave me earlier this week, and would suggest it to both believers and doubters. I found quite a bit of separation between what I perceived to be important in Christianity, and what is not.

Perhaps I'm opening up a can of worms people don't want to get involved with, but I'm a very logical thinker, and have found more logic than I expected the explanation from this book, my friends, and the sermons I've heard. I'm free to share what I've learned if anyone is curious. I've found that talking about these things has really helped me determine what I believe.

[Apothecary]

how does your 'logical' thought process contend with the fact that the scientific community has never documented anything suggesting a supernatural influence, let alone a silly zombie-deity?