Belief... or lack thereof

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The difference between a) and b) is that in a), I simply do not accept that God/gods exist. In b) I affirm that God/gods do not exist.
I know I can’t make a claim of not existence of such a being.
I can say that it seems like it doesn’t exist… but it’s been philosophized into such a corner of immaterialness that it’s impossible to state that it doesn’t exist.
So all we can honestly say is that we don’t believe that it exists.

…not sure I helped to clear it up… 😦
Not a lot I’m afraid. Probably need a legally trained person to differentiate the finer points between a and b. But having said that, how did you arrive that a) is correct for you? How did you verify that is the right belief? If it is just a decision you made without justification, then it is difficult to talk much about it. But you won’t come here to post your decision without any justification, would you?😃

In fact I think that was the main thrust of your post. Inviting folks to challenge your belief. Perhaps I’ll cut back on my other post and just focus on your belief system.
 
Because then you’ll be receptive to whatever is proven to be right… or should be receptive…
Stubbornness does tend to seep in…
Not true, for either side, one of us would be stubborn and prone to disbelieving the information revealed.

To say that not believing in a God is better then believing in a God because of receptivity is false and relative.
 
I’m claiming that this is a possibility.
Scientists are not making any claims about pre-BigBang conditions. They can only make claims about what is measurable and where the models lead, provided the current observable Universe.
Unless the science community has some evidence that prior to the Big Bang space/time already existed, that thought is just speculation. The possibility that you allude to, does it have a basis then? If not, then it is just wishing.
Why do you say there wasn’t enough time?
Universal expansion allowed for quarks to coalesce into protons. Gravity brought bunches of protons together… they were so many that they started fusing, thus originating stars. Gravity from these stars clumped into galaxies and… well… these initial stars would have burned up quite “quickly”, within 5 billion years, casting out the products of all their fusion reactions… .these products find themselves near other bunches of protons which are clumping together and forming a new star… around this second generation star, the heavier elements produced by the first star can coalesce into planets… these heavier elements include Lithium (3 protons), Beryllium (4 protons), Boron (5 protons), Carbon (6 protons), Nitrogen (7 protons), Oxygen (8 protons), etc… up to Iron (26 protons). Anything heavier was produced as the star went nova and is only found in trace amounts. This order of things is consistent with the abundance of these elements on Earth and the solar system.
Carbon is the lightest element which can bond with other 4 elements, all other elements can only bond with 3 or less other elements (except silicon which can bond with 4, but is heavier).
So it’s to be expected that carbon is the one that makes up most of the chemical reactions on Earth… it makes sense that carbohydrates would be formed - they are composed of Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen. The presence of water is also to be expected, as it is composed of Hydrogen and Oxygen. Water can serve as a medium where these carbohydrates can flow… eventually forming ever more complex molecules… then, by some conjunction of events, these molecules would become self-replicating, thus starting the life cycle that still lasts.
According to fossil records, this took some 1.5 billion years on Earth… why would it not be enough time?
1)Quarks or whatever particles, how did they come into existence?
2) There is no scientific knowledge that life can arise from such elements/conditions. Where did that information to create life comes from? That information is not in lifeless elements. You can’t squeeze information out from things that don’t contain such information in the first place.
3) Science can not account for the information in the cell. How did that information get there and pre-coded? These are not random meaningless data.
4)Darwin’s theory of gradual mutation is not backed by fossilised records. Fossils show big jump and differentiation of functions not forecasted by Darwin’s model. If empirical records do not support the theory, that theory need to be dropped. More questions in this link. evolutionnews.org/2012/07/what_are_the_to_1062011.html
5) There is not enough time in evolution to evolved to such sophistication. Even unlimited time may not be able to get there by natural means. You put a pile of iron ore for a zillion years exposed to the elements will not get you a Ferrari because the information is not there to create one. May be you get some molten iron. 1.5 billion years is really short. But something/someone did a short cut to get from precambrian to cambrian life forms. Earlier, something/someone did a short cut from non-life to life.
How did consciousness and religion get to people’s brains?
Consciousness seems to be available in a few animals, so it may be a very old trait, a very handy trait to have in social animals.
Yes, you have just described what is. My question was how did lifeless elements get to that state? How did lifeless elements get to become a living one celled organism with RNA information already coded and functioning as a holistic system and from this one cell organism, to become a self aware being, aware of being conscious, and from one celled organism becoming into a myriad of organisms with no source of information to become so diversified and with functioning specialized organs. You need (name removed by moderator)uts to get such outputs.
Religion is thought to have appeared when mankind started having time to think about the great questions - is this all there is?, what happens to me after I die?, why am I here?
And they had the time to think about these things after discovering how to handle fire, it seems.
Our explanation for religion is simple. God told us so. Many thousands of years ago. Written down ages ago.

If you do not have a source, your problem is to find a credible source of that information. And you would have to twist and turn to create the knowledge of religion with no convincing evidence that it happened that way. There is no evidence that you can provide that prove religion started that way. That stone age man on his own created the concept of a supreme God. Insects which have been around for 400 million years, do you think they have the concept of God? Of self awareness? Or birds, or fishes, worms, snakes etc?
There’s a branch of science called “psychology” which I think deals with this sort of thing…
It doesn’t deal with spiritual experiences. Spiritual experience is not a mental problem. Tagging people that experienced a spiritual incident with a psychological tag is just a lazy and silo approach to not to think out of the science box. Unless your information box is restricted to science and nothing else. And that is a self imposed constraint and not motivated by a genuine desire to pursue knowledge of whatever genre.
 
Pocaracas, you win a self-adhesive gold star for ‘Most Interesting Thread in a Long Time’. Thank you for starting it.

May I ask, if you were brought up with some sort of Christian religion, was there a particular moment or disagreement with a particular religious doctrine which you can identify as the time when you realised that you were an atheist?
 
Not a lot I’m afraid. Probably need a legally trained person to differentiate the finer points between a and b. But having said that, how did you arrive that a) is correct for you? How did you verify that is the right belief?
So… you’re asking me how I verified that my lack of belief “is the right belief”? Does this question make sense to you?

The other question, “how did I arrive that “lack of belief” is correct for me”, is a bit better, but still strange…
I don’t think I arrived at such a conclusion, ever… I just arrived at the state of non-belief and found it was ok. I see no problem with not believing in any god.
If it is just a decision you made without justification, then it is difficult to talk much about it. But you won’t come here to post your decision without any justification, would you?😃

In fact I think that was the main thrust of your post. Inviting folks to challenge your belief. Perhaps I’ll cut back on my other post and just focus on your belief system.
Like I said earlier, I don’t think that, generally, a belief is something that people arrive at rationally (Of course, I may be wrong).
Often, you believe what you’re told due to several factors:
  • evidence presented
  • trustworthiness of the person conveying the information
  • charisma of the person conveying the information
People don’t always go for the first as the primary means to accept a particular claim. And the second one is a bit exploited by believing parents.

Once you believe what you’re told, you then believe in the concept that was conveyed and live out your life as if that is true.
Evidence may then be presented which strengthens this belief. That evidence may be faulty, but you will tend to accept it as valid - a common example is the Argumentum ad populum (e.g. if 2 billion people believe in this, then they must be right).
For those who don’t believe in that thing, the fault of a particular argument for that belief is intrinsically easier to spot. No emotional connection exists to the correctness of the the belief, no desire to keep it going… and, in some cases, there’s a desire to stop it.

The same happens for any field of knowledge, where knowledge can be defined as “justified true belief”… justified, due to the evidence presented, true due to unbiased support from unconcerned or unrelated minds, belief because, philosophically speaking, we can’t ever know anything with 100% certainty… there’s always some room for error, so one has to ultimately believe in everything.
In science, only the evidence gets credit for convincing people. Even mathematical proofs are seen with some mistrust, requiring physical verification.

But I digress…
Typical belief, the kind present in religion, is, usually, first arrived at by some emotional connection to the subject matter or the person conveying it.
One mechanism is through trust in the parental figure - a trust encoded in our genes throughout evolution to help our young selves to stay away from harm, without having to experience it.
Another one is to play with people’s base desires…
People desire to life forever - religion provides the assurance that they will.
People want to help others, even if they can’t physically provide any help - prayer accomplishes that.
People want to be special and have some purpose in this world - religion provides that feeling.

I’m sure there could be many more examples, but any of these mechanisms is an emotional pathway for belief. Not a rational one. As such, the justifications provided by people for their belief tend to be these emotional ones… which, although satisfying to the self, are utterly useless to anyone who wishes to establish if the concepts being believed do have some basis in reality.

Pascal’s Wager is disguised as a rational mechanism… but fails because it then asks for the emotional belief which is not there.
 
Not true, for either side, one of us would be stubborn and prone to disbelieving the information revealed.

To say that not believing in a God is better then believing in a God because of receptivity is false and relative.
Yes, stubbornness would be detrimental to both sides. But such stubbornness is more likely to be felt in the believer than in the non-believer.
 
Depends on what you wish do show, I guess.
There’s that old saying “extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence”…
Ordinary claims, on the other hand, can the evidenced by simple things.
This is a faith-based statement.

There is nothing in the empirical world which proves the above to be true.

In fact, probability theorists demonstrate that the oft-repeated man-made tradition that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is absolutely FALSE.

"Probability theorists studying what sort of evidence it would take to establish a highly improbable event came to realize that if you just weigh the improbability of the event against the reliability of the testimony, we’d have to be sceptical of many commonly accepted claims. Rather what’s crucial is the probability that we should have the evidence we do if the extraordinary event had not occurred.3 This can easily offset any improbability of the event itself. In the case of the resurrection of Jesus, for example, this means that we must also ask, “What is the probability of the facts of the empty tomb, the post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection, if the resurrection had not occurred?” It is highly, highly, highly, improbable that we should have that evidence if the resurrection had not occurred.

Read more: reasonablefaith.org/stephen-law-on-the-non-existence-of-jesus-of-nazareth#ixzz3rHpceBSQ

IOW: extraordinary claims require SUFFICIENT evidence. Not extraordinary evidence.

You’ve just been duped into believing something without examining its veracity, poca.

You simply heard a man say “extraordinary beliefs require extraordinary evidence” and believed it. :eek:

Now, for a believer, we don’t always have a problem with believing something because we were told this by someone else.

However, for an atheist, believing without evidence is…well, isn’t that the biggest bugaboo in your paradigm?

It seems amusing to have an atheist believe something just because he was told it by someone else.
 
Unless the science community has some evidence that prior to the Big Bang space/time already existed, that thought is just speculation. The possibility that you allude to, does it have a basis then? If not, then it is just wishing.
Yes, you’re right.
I keep telling this. Any thing we say about pre-big-bang conditions (if a pre-big-bang makes any sense) is only speculation.
We’re dealing in hypotheticals.
However, it’s nice to mention that some of those do not require a pre-existing consciousness, like a god. Thus allowing us to live happily and care free. 😉
1)Quarks or whatever particles, how did they come into existence?
That’s the same as asking “what created the big bang?” I don’t know… anything we say about that is pure speculation.
  1. There is no scientific knowledge that life can arise from such elements/conditions. Where did that information to create life comes from? That information is not in lifeless elements. You can’t squeeze information out from things that don’t contain such information in the first place.
Self-replication can be found in a number of lifeless elements. We typically call them crystals. Crystals stop replicating when no more material is available for them to do so… as long as the conditions are right, they keep going…
Carbon-based replicators would be some of the most complex or varied, as carbon can bond with up to 4 other atoms in a series of different geometries. Those that worked best for the task of replication, “survived”.
Early carbon-based self-replicators would have “survived” while enough material was around for them to keep replicating… some would find themselves in some sort of a protective bubble, one which would have given them some advantage, so the replicators that managed to take advantage of that protection would have “survived” more than the ones without…
At some point, the carbon-based replicators would become complex enough to be close to what we now call RNA… how exactly, I don’t know… no one was there to record it.
  1. Science can not account for the information in the cell. How did that information get there and pre-coded? These are not random meaningless data.
Not random meaningless data, indeed.
Initially, it must have just been some simple self-replicating carbon-based molecule. Then it grew.
4)Darwin’s theory of gradual mutation is not backed by fossilised records. Fossils show big jump and differentiation of functions not forecasted by Darwin’s model. If empirical records do not support the theory, that theory need to be dropped. More questions in this link. evolutionnews.org/2012/07/what_are_the_to_1062011.html
That link seems flooded with misinformation… reminds me of the guy who said that the Earth could not be as old as 4 billion years, because the moon is moving away from the Earth at a rate that would bring them together only some 1 billion years ago… something must be wrong, and I doubt it’s the multiple radio-isotope dating methods.

I’m not a biologist, so I can only provide a layman view of those questions.
Just for yours, concerning the incompleteness of the fossil record, I point you to the unlikely event that is fossilization. We’re lucky to have as many fossils as we have.
There will always be gaps on those.
  1. There is not enough time in evolution to evolved to such sophistication. Even unlimited time may not be able to get there by natural means.
I ask again, why do you think so?
What prevents the early carbon-based self-replicators from bundling up?
You put a pile of iron ore for a zillion years exposed to the elements will not get you a Ferrari because the information is not there to create one. May be you get some molten iron. 1.5 billion years is really short. But something/someone did a short cut to get from precambrian to cambrian life forms. Earlier, something/someone did a short cut from non-life to life.
Maybe the conditions were just right during that time.
Also, the Precambrian may not be what you think: " It spans from the formation of Earth about 4.6 billion years ago (Ga) to the beginning of the Cambrian Period, about 541.0 ± 1.0 million years ago (Ma), when hard-shelled creatures first appeared in abundance."

[cont…]
 
[cont.d]
Yes, you have just described what is. My question was how did lifeless elements get to that state? How did lifeless elements get to become a living one celled organism with RNA information already coded and functioning as a holistic system and from this one cell organism, to become a self aware being, aware of being conscious, and from one celled organism becoming into a myriad of organisms with no source of information to become so diversified and with functioning specialized organs. You need (name removed by moderator)uts to get such outputs.
You are aware that you’re asking me to describe a huge chain of events, spanning hundreds of millions of years, for which we have mostly fossil records as evidence, right?
Fossil records which are a bit sparse and don’t tend to preserve soft tissue, mush less thoughts from proto-conscience.
Why do you cling to RNA?.. RNA is a late comer. It’s way too complex to have been the kind of self-replicating molecule that started up this life business.
Our explanation for religion is simple. God told us so. Many thousands of years ago. Written down ages ago.

If you do not have a source, your problem is to find a credible source of that information.
I like to keep in mind that people can lie. “God told us so. Many thousands of years ago”? “us”? Who is this “us”?
Who wrote it down?

Is your source credible?
And you would have to twist and turn to create the knowledge of religion with no convincing evidence that it happened that way. There is no evidence that you can provide that prove religion started that way. That stone age man on his own created the concept of a supreme God. Insects which have been around for 400 million years, do you think they have the concept of God? Of self awareness? Or birds, or fishes, worms, snakes etc?
No, I can’t prove that it started that way… but the artifacts left behind from early man don’t show crosses, nor stars of David, nor any other symbol associated with the Abrahamic God.
So, it doesn’t seem like that was the god that people worshiped back then…
It doesn’t deal with spiritual experiences. Spiritual experience is not a mental problem. Tagging people that experienced a spiritual incident with a psychological tag is just a lazy and silo approach to not to think out of the science box. Unless your information box is restricted to science and nothing else. And that is a self imposed constraint and not motivated by a genuine desire to pursue knowledge of whatever genre.
So tell me, can not all “spiritual experiences” be confined to the realm of the mental?
Is it impossible for the brain to generate those experiences, while the conscious part gets convinced that they are external?

Don’t people hear voices that aren’t there? See things that aren’t there? Feel things that aren’t there? And this can be accomplished by simple chemical tampering…
Imagine if a similar tampering could affect the emotional feelings in the brain?
 
Pocaracas, you win a self-adhesive gold star for ‘Most Interesting Thread in a Long Time’. Thank you for starting it.
😊
May I ask, if you were brought up with some sort of Christian religion, was there a particular moment or disagreement with a particular religious doctrine which you can identify as the time when you realised that you were an atheist?
I was born and raised in Portugal, a traditionally Catholic country.
My parents never gave any religious education… as far as I remember, that task fell on my grandmother and she only managed to do that a few times a year… it was enough for me to think that everyone on Earth thought more or less like that.
As a kid, I just went along and never gave it much thought.
Then, came the day when I connected cameras everywhere with God everywhere and something was amiss. Cameras existed, obviously… God, on the other hand… was just something people talked about. Maybe they were wrong…?..

That was the spark for me, when I realized I was… different. I kept it for myself, because I thought that everyone else believed in God. Of course, eventually, I found about other religions and other non-believers, then I learned about agnostics and… the notions involved just kept getting refined, until now.
🙂
 
This is a faith-based statement.

There is nothing in the empirical world which proves the above to be true.

In fact, probability theorists demonstrate that the oft-repeated man-made tradition that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is absolutely FALSE.

"Probability theorists studying what sort of evidence it would take to establish a highly improbable event came to realize that if you just weigh the improbability of the event against the reliability of the testimony, we’d have to be sceptical of many commonly accepted claims. Rather what’s crucial is the probability that we should have the evidence we do if the extraordinary event had not occurred.3 This can easily offset any improbability of the event itself. In the case of the resurrection of Jesus, for example, this means that we must also ask, “What is the probability of the facts of the empty tomb, the post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection, if the resurrection had not occurred?” It is highly, highly, highly, improbable that we should have that evidence if the resurrection had not occurred.

Read more: reasonablefaith.org/stephen-law-on-the-non-existence-of-jesus-of-nazareth#ixzz3rHpceBSQ

IOW: extraordinary claims require SUFFICIENT evidence. Not extraordinary evidence.

You’ve just been duped into believing something without examining its veracity, poca.

You simply heard a man say “extraordinary beliefs require extraordinary evidence” and believed it. :eek:

Now, for a believer, we don’t always have a problem with believing something because we were told this by someone else.

However, for an atheist, believing without evidence is…well, isn’t that the biggest bugaboo in your paradigm?

It seems amusing to have an atheist believe something just because he was told it by someone else.
Yes, you may be right…
I did say it was an old saying… a rule of thumb, if you will.

But you are right, even quantum mechanics, that early 20th century extraordinary claim, required only sufficient evidence for people to accept it.

Thanks for correcting me, there.
I hope that my views on the kind of evidence required has become better tuned now.
 
In support of the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” idea, there is an example I’ve heard several times.

If I were to claim that I have a pet dog, many people would be prepared to at least tentatively accept my word. Owning a dog is quite a common thing, it’s familiar to many people, and my owning a dog or lying about it has little or no effect on anyone else. Some people might require a bit more convincing, but I could provide photos of me and my dog with a current newspaper, I could (maybe) stream live video of me and my dog at home, and doubters could even be invited to visit my home to meet my dog, see the dog’s bowl, dog food in the cupboard, a dog basket in the living room and dog hairs in the covers on the sofa. All of these forms of evidence are pretty normal.

Now if I claim that in my garage there is a completely silent and invisible dragon that breathes invisible fire (which radiates no heat), then we’re in a very different situation. This is an extraordinary claim. Dragons are not known to exist and an invisible and silent one will be very difficult to demonstrate. I suggest that most people would not even tentatively believe that I was telling the truth. I would need to provide some extremely compelling evidence to convince anyone of such a far-fetched thing. In fact, I would have to go to extraordinary lengths.

My point is, this may be a rule-of-thumb, but it’s one that we all employ and verify by our own life experiences. We all demand different standards of evidence depending upon the unusualness of the claim and the consequences of accepting it.
 
If nothing material existed there would be a possibility that there was no Creator, but, as it stands…
 
If nothing material existed there would be a possibility that there was no Creator, but, as it stands…
As it stands, material things exist, so the possibility that there is no creator is also valid. No?
 
did the material things create themselves? or maybe matter is eternal? no beginning or end…
I don’t know. Do you?

EDIT:
I mean, I could speculate on a number of ways to bring about the material things we know of… but would any of them be any more valid than the God Hypothesis?
 
I don’t know. Do you?

EDIT:
I mean, I could speculate on a number of ways to bring about the material things we know of… but would any of them be any more valid than the God Hypothesis?
depends. they would have to account for qualities not found in matter.
 
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