Did you try feeling it in your heart? Feeling his presence? You just have to believe.
You just have to believe.
This is what really kept me questioning as a kid. "You just have to start with the conclusion!" but what religion can't I believe if I just start with the conclusion?
🎶🎶I need you Jesus, babyyyy🎶🎶
If you didn't feel it, you're a failure.
Of course if you did feel it chances are equal that you are also a failure.
I was devout and am willing to testify under oath that I felt moved at services more times than I can remember when I was a kid.
What the hell are these font choices?
Golden China Super Buffet IMPACT versus The A-Team Sans
You cannot compare religion and science. They are fundamentally different philosophies. Hence if someone tries to force one into the other they get garbeld garbage.
Science is the belief that what we observe with our five senses is reality. That's the belief system. It's based on a universal experience.
Remove that, and anything goes. Any religion has equal weight. With the exception that, for some reason, religious people believe the religion of their parents.
They often try to mold philosophy into their religion (what it means to be good) using some semblance of logic, but then inevitably tells you what happens in the afterlife.
Eh, science is more of a process than a belief system. You can use science to support or deny certain belief systems.
"I believe humans are fundamentally good"
Okay let's use psychology and philosophy to determine if that's true.
"I believe the earth is flat"
Okay let's use geology, astronomy, and physics to determine if that is true.
Also there are plenty of things that are part of reality which we can't observe with our "five senses", it's why we need to measure the effects and see the recordings instead.
bro physics/chem/bio ain't easy and straightforward this shit hard man
This isn't about the mechanism we use to understand the world, just how we do.
I’m firmly of the opinion that it takes as much faith to believe that this universe had no sentient creator as it does to believe that it had one.
BUT believing in a creator does not mean that you have to ignore scientific evidence of the way the universe functions
Ok that is your opinion. I wonder how you reached it and I also wonder if you started out neutral and came to that conclusion from what you learned or if you came from a religious tradition first.
It comes from the fact that there is no empirical evidence that a creator doesn’t exist (because evidence of a lack of existence is illogical) and from the fact that there is no explanation for the beginning of the universe that is logically sound (at least not yet). An infinite timeline doesn’t make more sense than an external being setting the timeline in motion
And that's where it falls apart. Science isn't a belief system; it's provable and repeatable.
Science will look at the evidence and come to the most logical conclusion. Different people may well come to different conclusions. When more evidence comes to light, it will disprove some of those conclusions and we end up closer to the truth. There is no "faith" or "belief" involved.
Science sees no evidence of a creator, therefore it doesn't factor one in. The door is left open for people to prove that there is a creator, but so far there has been no such evidence.
It sounds like you’re describing science and religion like they’re completely separate things, but I don’t see it that way at all. I wouldn’t describe science as a religion, but there’s definitely faith involved in the current dominant scientific theories. Until theory has been tested to exhaustion and there are no more tests to run, the theory lives on as a theory because it hasn’t been disproven (either fully or partially) and there is an assumption that it will not be disproven. That assumption is faith.
And I'm firmly of the opinion that it takes as much faith to believe that the universe has no unicorns that can fly as it does to believe it has none.
BUT believing in unicorns does not mean that you have to ignore scientific evidence of the way the universe functions.
See how proving a negative is silly?
By that standard, it takes as much faith to believe that this universe had no sentient creator as it does to believe it was created by space bees or whatever.
It doesn't take faith to not believe in a creator. There is a huge difference between "I don't believe in a sentient creator" and "I believe there was no sentient creator," and I don't know of a lot of atheists who are firmly in the second category. The lack of evidence (or need for it) would make for a better case for not existing, though, and with that in mind, saying "I don't think there was a sentient creator" doesn't require anywhere near the faith that saying "I believe there was a sentient creator" does. Being able to say "if there was this, there should have been evidence of it here" and finding no evidence is, itself, helpful to an argument of something not existing that would require evidence to prove it exists.
Religious get into this weird binary thinking, where it's belief in their particular thing or an equal disbelief of that thing, when it's really that that particular thing, lacking any evidence, is equally as likely as any other improbable and unprovable thing. Belief in God or disbelief in God, where it's really not believing in God, vampires, reptile people controlling the government, magic, fairies, or anything else without evidence, and all of those, lacking evidence are equal until evidence is produced. And that's not disbelief, it is the lack of belief.
It requires no faith to not believe in a sentient creator of the universe.
By that standard, it takes as much faith to believe that this universe had no sentient creator as it does to believe it was created by space bees or whatever.
Yup, that's my point. It takes faith to believe a creator does not exist.
It doesn’t take faith to not believe in a creator.
That's a good point. I hadn't considered agnosticism in this conversation. Refusing to accept something as true without evidence does not take faith. However, I maintain that it takes faith to assert that there is no god/creator since we do not have actual evidence of this.
Why? There is no evidence that a sentient creator exists or created the universe. So I have no reason to believe in one. Zero faith is required to have that opinion. Not knowing something doesn't mean I have to default to a god did it. A god is simply one of many possibilities, all with just as little evidence as the other.
Besides. Why can't there be multiple creators? Why does the creator have to be sentient? And who created the creator? Has the creator always existed? Seems to me that it takes more faith to believe a creator has always existed and then created the universe than it does to believe the universe itself has always existed. I'm not saying I believe any of that, but in this scenario either way something has always existed, yours just has one extra step.
We may one day find out what caused the beginning of the universe, or maybe we never will. Regardless, immediately attributing that which you do not understand to a god is no better than the people of ancient civilizations. Before we knew what caused lightning, we blamed Zeus. This is no different.
There is no evidence that a sentient creator exists or created the universe.
And there is no evidence that the universe appeared out of a void. I do not mean to say that it only makes sense to believe in a god/creator, I just meant to say that it makes as much sense to believe that there is a god as it does to believe that there is no god. I would argue it takes faith to do either, however it doesn't take faith to say you would not believe either without evidence.
Why can’t there be multiple creators? Why does the creator have to be sentient? And who created the creator? Has the creator always existed?
I have no answers for this question that don't involve what I personally believe on faith and not on evidence, and I cannot make any sensible effort to try to convince you of it so I won't.
either way something has always existed, yours just has one extra step.
I agree something has likely always existed, and whatever it is I would call it "the creator." I have my own personal beliefs about the creator being sentient but I have no proof of that.
Feel morally superior > make judgements against others > legislate your “beliefs”
