Evolution or God

If there is a god/gods etc they are a bunch of sickos.

The things some people go through in this world. No amount of religious nonsense can make me believe a god/gods are "good".

For me, there's either no god/gods. Or they are a sick and twisted.

Personally I like the simulation theory. That holds up better than the traditional religions.
 
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413x said:
If there is a god/gods etc they are a bunch of sickos.

The things some people go through in this world. No amount of religious nonsense can make me believe a god/gods are "good".

For me, there's either no god/gods. Or they are a sick and twisted.

Personally I like the simulation theory. That holds up better than the traditional religions.
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But who created the simulation and who created the person or being that created the simulation?

I'm not high enough for this conversation.
 
People talk about Christian fundamentalist orthodoxy in the negative when framed in the context of those believing in the Creation account, ie earth being 6,000-7,000 years old. Isn't true Christianity pretty fundamental around these concepts though?

Surely for a person believing in what can only be considered a cosmic level Miracle that God sent his son Jesus to die on a cross, to bear humankinds sins so that true faith and belief in him, with repentance away from ones sins, gives the grace of eternal life; believing in the Genesis creation account (6k year old earth) is the easy step?

The concept of the possibility of going to heaven or hell and all the theological biblical spirituality accompanying this is a big faith-foundational step to take.

Is it not simply easier to believe in evolution?
 
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413x said:
If there is a god/gods etc they are a bunch of sickos.

The things some people go through in this world. No amount of religious nonsense can make me believe a god/gods are "good".

For me, there's either no god/gods. Or they are a sick and twisted.

Personally I like the simulation theory. That holds up better than the traditional religions.
Click to expand...

One thing I find interesting - few religious people ever question or want to question the [true] nature of God/gods. Just accept/believe the face value. Never believe the face value that is how you get scammed.

Reduced down there are probably only 2 possibilities really - either everything is this universe, even though we think of ourselves as individuals we are all just the universe, or in some form or other this is a simulation.
 
413x said:
If there is a god/gods etc they are a bunch of sickos.

The things some people go through in this world. No amount of religious nonsense can make me believe a god/gods are "good".

For me, there's either no god/gods. Or they are a sick and twisted.

Personally I like the simulation theory. That holds up better than the traditional religions.
Click to expand...

100% Atheist here who used to be a born again in the 70s but I want to put the reason why there is so much bad in the World held by those with belief.
If we take the 'main' God, the one that the vast majority of the World believe in shared by Christians, Catholics, Jews & Muslims but have different attributes assigned to them, then that God is not actually the Lord of this World, Satan is.
That God isn't strong enough to make everything nice so it's our job to follow 'him' and then when we're dead he'll look after us in our afterlife.
 
R.P.L said:
The important thing to remember is not to be a dick to people whose beliefs (and yes they are beliefs, no matter how 'factual' you think they are) are different to yours. Something which too many people struggle with.
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True enough, I don't care what anybody believes in so long as it doesn't inflict pain or hardship on anybody with different or no 'beliefs'.
 
I think there's probably more to the universe and life than we know or understand. A lot of our science cannot answer the questions that we seek. Those gaps are often filled by faith or a belief that there's an answer somewhere. It doesn't have to be God or a god it can be whatever drives you to accept or understand the situation before you.

If science can answer 99.9% of the questions there's always that 0.1% of doubt somewhere that people will latch on to.

However science also changed and evolves and isn't absolute. The rules imposed by scientific discoveries and evidence are based on our current understanding of science which is something that we invented. Is it wrong? Who knows. It's allowed us to fly, go to space, cure cancers and build an incredible world. But it's like being given a Lego set, there's a limit to what we can do until either new pieces are added to the set, or se discover more elements within the sets we have. The imagination of what we're building with the Lego set could be intercepted as faith I guess.

Honestly it doesn't bother me if people are convinced about their faith it must be comforting to have something like that to support you in life. And sure evolution has been proven, and you can actually see it happening, but that doesn't answer all the questions for everyone. It answers enough for me but I'm always happy to be challenged or have people disagree and share their perspectives. I'm not too proud to be wrong nor do I glee in being write. I prefer a far more balanced outlook on life. The only thing I ask is that their beliefs aren't forced on me but just offered as a perspective.
 
Steven Rimmington said:
[..] I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but does anyone in here believe we were all created by God? It would be interesting to get your opinions and how you have come to this conclusion? I want to try and understand what made us go down a different path? Is it just down to pure religion? Believing in the Bible? Or have I got this all wrong :confused: [..]
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The ~6000 year universe idea is not from the Christian bible. It's from a bishop. Seriously. That's really where it's from. What he did was pick out the lists of ancestors mentioned in the old testament, assume (for some reason) that they were a complete list of the entire family line from the beginning of the universe to the time of Jesus, plug in some estimated lifespans for each person and total them up. Which resulted in the idea that the universe was created in the morning of a specific day in 4004 BC.

I'm really not joking:

en.wikipedia.org

James Ussher - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

All I was wrong about was the spelling of his name and the time of day on which he claimed the world was created - he said evening, not morning.

So yeah...not exactly well rooted in the religion itself let alone in reality.

Created by god...which one(s)? There have been thousands of gods believed in by various people at various times in various places and that's just the ones we know about from historical records. There were probably many more for which no record has survived, especially in prehistory. How, for example, could we know what god(s) a specific tribe believed in half a million years ago? A tribe we know nothing at all about. Maybe we have just one preserved footprint to tell us people were there back then. Maybe some stone tools.

Like all of religion, it's a deliberately non-falsifiable hypothesis. How did everything start? My god did it. When did it start? When whoever I believe says it did. What about evidence contradicting that timing? My god faked the evidence to test out faith. There's no possible counter-argument because it's not based on evidence, reasoning or anything at all other than faith.

Were we all created by <insert a god or gods here>? How would I know? No way of testing a deliberately non-falsifiable hypothesis and there's (at least currently) no way of acquiring evidence regarding the cause of the beginning of everything. So it's possible that it was kicked off by a god or gods who set up the way everything in the universe works and started it going. We have an ever-increasing amount of knowledge of how the universe works, but that doesn't cover how it started. Or if it started in any meaningful way. If time is part of the universe rather than being seperate from it, then the universe has existed for all time and therefore never began. Or maybe a more local god or gods started life on Earth somehow. Maybe with supernatural knowledge letting them know that after a couple of billion years humans would exist. Or maybe just because they could and felt like seeing what would happen. Or maybe there was no reason why everything started or why life started, no cause, no entity doing it. Just a thing that happened for no reason. Who knows?

I don't know and I don't feel a need to tell myself I know, so I'm OK with saying "I don't know" and don't feel any need for belief.
 
I struggle to comprehend the intricacies of the world and life. Am I religious? Not really, no. But it makes no sense to me that life as we know it evolved from a 'Big Bang'...
 
RobDogDog said:
I struggle to comprehend the intricacies of the world and life. Am I religious? Not really, no. But it makes no sense to me that life as we know it evolved from a 'Big Bang'...
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There isn't currently a theory regarding the beginning of life as we know it. Evolution covers the changes in life over time, not the beginning of life. Biogenesis is a different thing entirely, not part of evolution. The beginning of the universe is another different thing entirely, not part of biogenesis and not part of evolution.

On a related note, the term "big bang" is misleading anyway and some people would prefer a different name. But "big bang" proved catchy and we're stuck with it.
 
R.P.L said:
The important thing to remember is not to be a dick to people whose beliefs (and yes they are beliefs, no matter how 'factual' you think they are) are different to yours. Something which too many people struggle with.
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No, that's not important at all. In fact it is better to ridicule said people. Point and laugh, etc. Well, educate any way.
 
Angilion said:
There isn't currently a theory regarding the beginning of life as we know it. Evolution covers the changes in life over time, not the beginning of life. Biogenesis is a different thing entirely, not part of evolution. The beginning of the universe is another different thing entirely, not part of biogenesis and not part of evolution.

On a related note, the term "big bang" is misleading anyway and some people would prefer a different name. But "big bang" proved catchy and we're stuck with it.
Click to expand...
The evolution of something like the senses blows my mind. There are things to see, so an eye evolves. There are sound waves, so lets evolve something to hear. It does make me wonder what else (if anything) we're missing because we don't have the senses to perceive it. Was it a case of we needed to perceive something or that the something needed to be perceived?

What the hell is going on with my brain on this Monday morning :D?!
 
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