Are you retarded?

blackoutHERO wrote:

Seven wrote:Not sure if I've posted this before...but anyway:

I do believe there is something like a god-alike person but I just don't follow any of religious beliefs at all; nor I don't feel any need to pray/something. Just go "Oh yeah, god might exist after all" and that's it.

I'm not sure what this makes me, so I just say I'm Agonestic..if that's even right term?

I think so. As far as I'm aware Agnostic is the belief of some higher being but not know what it is.

An Agnostic is someone who doesn't know one way or another. I.E fifty percent believe 50% don't, or at least round about that number.

Fm wrote::smug:

Fm wrote::smug:

Fm wrote::smug:

Fm wrote:

blackoutHERO wrote:Fine, you all win. I am now atheist, MON THE SCIENCE.

That Darwin dude eh? Great guy. And what about that big bang? Awesome stuff.

It doesn't concern you in the slightest that your reasoning doesn't stand up to even a small amount of questioning? I would feel like a right twat if I went around believing something that could be shaken so much by the intellect of your average bloke. Not that I'm calling you a twat, it's just how I would feel. If you want to go around in cuckoo land then that's your business and I'm glad it makes you happy. I can't say I wouldn't welcome this gift of faith that you have; I'm not going to lie, the fact that one day I will be dead and my existence will cease to exist completely scares the crap out of me.

lex-man wrote:

Carlos wrote:

MCN wrote:

blackoutHERO wrote:

Balloon Sod wrote:When I was a Christian as a teenager, I never set out to stop beleving in God. It just sort of happened, as it was entirely incompatible with everything else.

When I was an atheist teenage, I never set out to start believing in God. It just happened

So you're willing to put your gut feeling over the wealth of actual, tangible evidence against any creation or design? And we're not allowed to call that silly?

Oh, of course, it's religion, therefore it is above reproach.

I really wanted to avoid this arguement and I really do hate to be pendantic but there isn't any tangible evidence to suggest the the universe wasn't created by something or someone (God, Galactus, Unicron, Steve etc) but there is tangible evidence that creationism and the biblical creation story is false.

Fact is we will never know what created the universe. For all I know it was Steve jump starting the big bang from his fiesta.

But surely Atheists are saying "I don't really know what created the universe", while religious people are giving a definitive answer "it was god".
As an Atheist my position is that there is no evidence to prove one way or the other what created the universe and anyone who gives an answer is just making stuff up and is therefore, in all likely-hood wrong.

The answer most atheists would give is 'i couldn't give a toss. gooseberry fool happens'

I think of it scientifically: as far as the rigid, set in stone laws of physics are concerned it impossible for anything on our level of comprehension to create or obliterate matter. When an object is destroyed it is merely broken down into it's constituent parts; it cannot be removed from existence. The laws of thermodynamics state that energy cannot be created, merely transformed from one form into another.
Assumig the laws of physics are true you cannot create something from nothing and so either the collective matter in the universe has ALWAYS existed, which cannot be true, as the only universal constant is death and there will be a time when all the stars have ceased to exist and if the universe has an end it must have had a beginning or a being beyond our realm of comprehension created it. This being could be described as God, but it could just as well be something else, or even a collective, like the Q.

So either something created the universe, or it has always been here since time immemorial.

I've never understood why some religiouss folk have such a problem with all the matter in the universe having always existed for infinity, always citing that it must have come from somewhere or other cutely naive statements, but then have absolutely no problem at all accepting unquestioningly that God has done just that, and has always existed and was not created by anybody. In fact, to apply the exact same logic that seems to be so difficult when dealing with matter; that 'it must have been created by something' to their deity is often quite insulting to them.

It's amusing in it's own little way.

Carlos wrote:Assumig the laws of physics are true you cannot create something from nothing and so either the collective matter in the universe has ALWAYS existed, which cannot be true, as the only universal constant is death and there will be a time when all the stars have ceased to exist and if the universe has an end it must have had a beginning or a being beyond our realm of comprehension created it. This being could be described as God, but it could just as well be something else, or even a collective, like the Q.

Why can it not be true that the universe has always existed? Time itself is essentially nothing more than a construct of man. Events happen, and some will occur more frequently than other events, but it's man who invented the concept of measuring these frequencies, devising timekeeping, and with it beginnings and ends. Saying the only universal constant is death is irrelevant. It applies only to living things, but not all matter is living. We may die, the stars may burn out, but the matter that comprises everything will still exist, so the universe may never have an end.

The universe has NOT always existed though. It began.

Donk wrote:The universe has NOT always existed though. It began.

What's that claim based on?

Donk wrote:The universe has NOT always existed though. It began.

The universe as we know it had a starting point, but there's nothing to suggest the matter involved hadn't existed infinitely before it.

Or, indeed, that the explosion/collapse cycle we're currently part of has not been happening over and over again since infinity.

The mind boggles at the sheer scale of what might be possible once we stop letting God constrain our imagination.

I wasn't brought up following a religion, but when I went to uni I became interested in Christianity, more from a curiosity point of view than anything. I looked into it/followed it for about two years in all. It was very interesting, and worth doing. I met dozens and dozens of people who had all experienced something or were convinced that their faith was true, and they followed it to the point that it was the central thing in their life. Everything else - work, relationships, etc was secondary.

The more time went on the more disillusioned I became with it, and while people could provide answers to the questions I had, it got to the point where I just didn't believe it. Some parts of Christianity I just can't get past.

Admittedly I haven't looked into Islam, or Judaism, or Sikhism, or whatever else, but the crux of the matter for me is that I don't think a God would make us and then make it so damn difficult to actually find him or get to the point where people doubt he exists. What's the point? If God's there why not just show himself?

I still keep in touch with a lot of my Christian friends (my best mate is about as devout a Christian as you can get) and we have conversations sometimes, but I can't really see myself going back to it. My view now is that yeah, there might be a God of some sort, but I don't think it's the one Christians believe in, and to be honest I don't really care about him/it. I don't need to know, I don't want to know especially, and it doesn't affect me either way. So these days I'm firmly in the "couldn't care less" camp.

Part of the problem is that we look at things from a point of view of what we've experienced as humans. For example, we seem to believe that everything needs oxygen or what constitutes as 'air' in order to live and survive. Why? There could easily be livings things out there that don't need those elements to live.

We also seem to think that things must have been created at some point, and have a starting point. Not the case at all - just because we can trace things on Earth to a starting point, and the majority of what's here has been created, they've all come from basic building blocks that were there to begin with. Where did those come from? Again though, it's something I struggle to care about these days.

Knoyleo wrote:

Donk wrote:The universe has NOT always existed though. It began.

What's that claim based on?

If you follow the theory of the big bang, at some point there was nothing, and in nothing, nothing exists. How could matter exist in such a nothingness?

Unless of course, we're talking about matter that doesn't exist in our universe. Such matter could react and create something, but doesn't exist in our universe.

Donk wrote:

Knoyleo wrote:

Donk wrote:The universe has NOT always existed though. It began.

What's that claim based on?

If you follow the theory of the big bang, at some point there was nothing, and in nothing, nothing exists. How could matter exist in such a nothingness?

Unless of course, we're talking about matter that doesn't exist in our universe. Such matter could react and create something, but doesn't exist in our universe.

Whoa, that's not what the big bang theory (Penny ) postulates. It says that all the matter in the universe existed in one infinitely dense, tiny speck, not that it wasn't there.

Donk wrote:

Knoyleo wrote:

Donk wrote:The universe has NOT always existed though. It began.

What's that claim based on?

If you follow the theory of the big bang, at some point there was nothing, and in nothing, nothing exists. How could matter exist in such a nothingness?

Like Skarjo says, it's theorised to have been a singularity, so it existed, but in the smallest amount of space possible. Most likely before that, it had contracted from something as huge as the universe we recognise today.

It's pretty amazing to think about how much humanity must not actually know about the universe. For as much as we know, it might as well be nothing.

Donk wrote:

Knoyleo wrote:

Donk wrote:The universe has NOT always existed though. It began.

What's that claim based on?

If you follow the theory of the big bang, at some point there was nothing, and in nothing, nothing exists. How could matter exist in such a nothingness?

Unless of course, we're talking about matter that doesn't exist in our universe. Such matter could react and create something, but doesn't exist in our universe.

How do you define 'nothingness'? If it is a characterless empty void you are still implying it is something, even if it had no characteristics. If the universe is expanding into
nothingness, but nothing doesn't exist as a measurable emptiness then nothing actually doesn't exist and there nothing for the universe to expand into, meaning it cannot expand.

Jaxley wrote:It's pretty amazing to think about how much humanity must not actually know about the universe. For as much as we know, it might as well be nothing.

And personally, I think it is better to try and found out the real answers, rather than making stuff up.

In my opinion life is just a bi-product of a certain set of conditions and chemicals, the quicker we accept that and stop looking for a higher power or a reason for our existence the better.

Carlos wrote:

Donk wrote:

Knoyleo wrote:

Donk wrote:The universe has NOT always existed though. It began.

What's that claim based on?

If you follow the theory of the big bang, at some point there was nothing, and in nothing, nothing exists. How could matter exist in such a nothingness?

Unless of course, we're talking about matter that doesn't exist in our universe. Such matter could react and create something, but doesn't exist in our universe.

How do you define 'nothingness'? If it is a characterless empty void you are still implying it is something, even if it had no characteristics. If the universe is expanding into
nothingness, but nothing doesn't exist as a measurable emptiness then nothing actually doesn't exist and there nothing for the universe to expand into, meaning it cannot expand.

That isn't what is meant by 'expansion'. It's an intrinsic expansion -- characterised by the relative seperation of parts in the Universe. There is simply more space as time goes on. An analogy is, you can increase the surface area of a balloon by blowing it up; you don't need any additional balloons to facilitate the expansion of surface area.