Poll: What is your religion?

What is your religion?

  • Christian

    Votes: 94 14.0%

  • Muslim

    Votes: 31 4.6%

  • Jewish

    Votes: 3 0.4%

  • Sikh

    Votes: 12 1.8%

  • Hindu

    Votes: 8 1.2%

  • Buddhist

    Votes: 6 0.9%

  • Atheist

    Votes: 236 35.2%

  • Other

    Votes: 37 5.5%

  • Agnostic

    Votes: 155 23.1%

  • Jedi

    Votes: 88 13.1%
  • Total voters
    670
Touchstone said:
ill go with quoting the impossible to disprove a negative, someones put up the flying spaghetti monster. you cant prove hes not there, but life suggests hes probably not.
as to the science not being able to deal with it, thats such crap (without sounding like im flaming). why cant sciene deal with it?
if god did exist then he would become a part of tangible science, just like if something is proved to be of medical benift it becomes medicine.
even if we science cannot explain it it still struggles to understand it, all you have to do is look at quantum physics! that makes no sense at all but still try to understand it
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Science can't deal with it because science can't deal with anything for which a testable hypothesis cannot be defined.

The application of a priori assumptions to untestable hypothesis (as you have done above) is not scientific.
 
semi-pro waster said:
Science can't deal with god because the question of a god is not one that science was ever intended to answer. Science is a predictive model based on observed evidence - I'll see if I can put this a bit differently. It makes precisely no odds to science whether mavity for instance is caused by the mass of objects or whether it's millions of leprechauns all exerting their special powers on pulling objects towards them - provided the results remain consistent then science effectively says "don't give a stuff". It doesn't matter to the results and sciences effectiveness as a predictively accurate tool - this is usually the part where someone misquotes Occam's Razor in support of science.

Why does a god have to be a part of tangible science?



It is a position of faith - you're making a definite statement on an untestable hypothesis.

Your last sentence is contradictory, if you've got no prejudice then you don't take a stance on something until you've heard the evidence. Personally I don't believe in any religion that I've yet heard of but I'm a long way from discounting the possibility that a god exists.



Atheism is the one for you then. :)
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heh i do like occams razor! but i would say this is does matter to science, precisley because you could predict other things if there were leprechauns running around, science isnt just the prediction of results, its a struggle to understand them fully.
now youre last point i have trouble understanding, there is no evidence for or against. therefore it doesnt exist? why is religion so different from all the other laws (i use that term lolsley) of the universe?
 
Touchstone said:
hmm im not sure it makes sense at all, for instance a founding principle of quantum is that an electron is both wave and a particle, we dont understand it at all!
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But we did predict it and then test it to find it does seem to be the case.


well thats not right at all, were discovering actually that we dont understand that mavity for instance is not a constant, and that it also my change over distance, we have a formulae that seems to work on our scale of things but it also doesnt seem to work on the truly massive scale. our understanding of things is incomplete
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That was my point mate.

Newtonian physics seemed to answer all the questions and did work pretty well for predicting planets positions etc then later we found it wasn't entirely accurate.




no i havent ive asserted nothing, not a negative or a positive.
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Yes you have you have stated there is no god.



ive never understood this so youl have to help me out here. why do you need proof of somethign that dooesnt exist.
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You don't which is why religion is is a belief.


the ownus isnt on me to disprove something its on 'you' to prove it. and as of yet through the history of human civilisation no one has ever even come close to proving there is a god.
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No it's both of you.

You say with no proof there is no god.

Up to you to prove that.


They say there is a god.

Up to them to prove that.

Agnostics say " don't know/there isn't enough evidence/a test to decide so i won't say either way".

Agnosticism is the position of not asserting anything.

Both atheism and theism assert that there is one thing or another.


If i say there is no mavity.

The onus is on me to prove that despite the fact i have not said there is "something" not for you to prove there is.
 
i cannot prove that something that doesnt exist does exist, just as you cannot prove that somethign that doesnt exist does exist.
therefore it doesnt exist. if there is no evidence for somethign it is not there.
i think there must be a fundamental difference between people who can see a god to people who cant, im yet to understand it in the slightest.
 
Touchstone said:
i cannot prove that something that doesnt exist does exist, just as you cannot prove that somethign that doesnt exist does exist.
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Now you're getting it.

So what do you think is the logical position to take with no evidence on either side.

To choose a side and believe it (they are both the same in terms of proof) is correct or to say there is no way of knowing.



i think there must be a fundamental difference between people who can see a god to people who cant
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yeah generally people who see god are nutters or on powerful hallucinogens :p
 
i think its such a bizarre debate this, not that its not interesting, but i feel i fail in intelligence and time to really put my thoughts into writing which is why i refer to dawkins! have you read the god delsusion by any chance tefal?
 
Agnostic.

I used to be quite a 'passionate' atheist, but stepping back a bit and looking at the question of God rationally, I really don't know. Nor does everyone else. Sure, you can claim that there is no evidence to support the idea of a God, but that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't one. So my mind is open. I can understand why people are religious, but for me, the evidence is not strong enough.

However, Pascal's Wager is interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager
 
Atheist/Agnostic, I chose not to believe in god but honestly when it comes down to it, who can really tell?
 
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Touchstone said:
i cannot prove that something that doesnt exist does exist, just as you cannot prove that somethign that doesnt exist does exist.
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The fact that you assert this suggests you don't really understand how you test things in science. While you can't prove it absolutely, you can certainly conduct a robust enough test with a specific enough hypothesis to eliminate the existence of anything testable beyond reasonable doubt.

The real problem is that you can't construct that hypothesis in such a way with the idea of a deity.

therefore it doesnt exist. if there is no evidence for somethign it is not there.
i think there must be a fundamental difference between people who can see a god to people who cant, im yet to understand it in the slightest.
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The default position on an untested or untestable hypothesis is not that it is false, that's a faith based position resulting from application of a priori assumption. The default position on an untested or untestable hypothesis is that it is unknown.

To invoke the assumption that absence of evidence is evidence of absence in a non faith based manner, you have to know exactly what evidence you are looking for, and that the evidence would definitely be there to detect if the hypothesis was true. Again, that can't be done in this case.
 
I voted Atheist but Im somewhere between that and agnostic. I accept the fact that there maybe something 'else' beyond our understanding but I think the organised religions are utter bull ****
 
apeZ said:
However, Pascal's Wager is interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager
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Only problem is how do you know which religion to follow if any at all?

If the god is the Christian god then following Islam might just **** him off even more than not believing :p




Touchstone said:
have you read the god delsusion by any chance tefal?
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No, while I respect Dawkins as an excellent Biologist, he takes the whole religion/atheism thing to extreme sto the point her is now as bad as some evangelical Christians in terms of fanatical belief.

Like I said there is no proof at all for either side, as such I am content to wait until someone find proof either way before I choose a side.

I keep meaning to read it along with philosophy of science and the selfish gene :o
 
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