To hell with simulations, let's see what happens when we up the planet's thermostat a few degrees.
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Tbh science hasn’t disproven God either. It’s an open question. It’s of course unlikely that God will be the God of the Bible if and when we discover him, though....
Maybe from a theist's perspective. It's a form of confirmation bias. If you believe in a god, the unexplained serves as justification for whatever you believe in. Before people knew how they worked, things like lightning, plagues and natural catastrophes could perfectly be passed off as a god's actions, leading to a circular logic where those events justify god and god justifies those events. But they were just unanswered questions, much like the origins of the universe. I think the Universe looks more like a random mess than something a sentient all-powerful being would create, not to mention omnipotence itself is a paradox.
I completely agree with Sylvanas here. Although it's possible and somewhat likely IMO that a world creator exists, it's not proven, and you cannot say the existence of the universe proves the existence of a creator. As much as the creator could have been there for eternity, the universe, simply existing, could, too.
LOL
My point was that it’s unfair to compare the existence of God with miracles. That comparison isn’t even close lol. No matter how you spin it the creation or whatever? The origins of the Universe don’t make any sense; you either have to believe that it has always existed (kek), that it emerged from nothing, or that a supreme being or force created it - which begs the question, who or what created that being?
I agree with this, it's a bit weird that anything exists in the first place. Then again, it would also be just as weird if nothing existed at all.
The way I see it, and religion in general, is that it's so outside of mine and anyone else's realm of understanding that it's truly not worth thinking about at all, at least in any serious capacity. Anything we can come up with is fancy speculation, because there's no way within our physical laws (at least, as far as we know) to formulate any scientific theory or gather evidence for any hypothesis. Thinking about what exists outside our universe, where our universe came from, and how time and the such formed is as much of a useless endeavour as hypothesizing whether aliens exist in a specific galaxy billions of light years from us and what they might have for lunch. I just don't see why it's something that people think is necessary to think about, beyond personal interest and fun theorycrafting.
Oh and my point with this is that if nothing existed at all, then we wouldn't be around to think about all this. It's a form of selection bias. We only think that the universe existing is significant because we can't possibly experience the other potential natural states in which it doesn't. The concept of time and distance is also another weird one; we only think anything is far away or takes a long time because that's the scales that we think in. Time is just another dimension, we just think it's somehow conceptually different to the other dimensions because that's how we evolved to perceive the world. The universe by and large exists only in the context of our perception of it.
I think the comparison is fair. Lightning used to make as little sense as the origins of the universe does now. Either way, my point is that religious explanations were used to fill the void wherever science couldn't find answers. We don't have that answer now and likely never will, but it doesn't make the religious outlook anymore justifiable.
Exactly, but why is it preferable to involve a supreme being into the equation? Who created the thing who created god who created the universe? Ultimately we still can't explain why something came from nothing. God is just an unnecessary middle step.
Tbh, I hear a lot of (maybe most) atheists tout very cynical views on why religion exists or its origins i.e. it was made up to explain things or it was made up to try and control people. Noone can really say for sure how or where religion comes from, but I find it very unlikely it went like that. SJ's video is amusing but misrepresentative imo. I think these narrow explanations stem from the fact most atheists view religion as a collection of empirical statements. However, religious people don't necessarily view their religion that way, nor have they necessarily ever. I'm not simply asserting that they blindly believe these things out of emotion, either. That again is still viewing it in terms of empirical statements.
Faith isn't an assertion of some statement or an emotional thing. It's more like a mood. If statements are the foreground objects in a painting, and the colours are the emotions, then faith is like the background. Whether you believe or not affects how you contextualize everything in the foreground without fundamentally changing the items in the foreground. Though it has no effect on the objects of the foreground, it totally changes the painting. I think the loss of faith in our society has less to do with what we've learnt about the foreground objects and more how we contextualize those objects.
this video is okay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJZ8ib93vSk
p;edit Well, there are a lot of empirical statements in religion too I guess lol. I guess I'm trying to say there's more to it than just a collection of empirical statements. And "faith" doesn't represent some kind of axiomatic belief.