J
john_doran
Guest
ahh, i see now. but why should anyone believe this?
How would you go about proving God's existence to an atheist or agnostic?
- Status
G
Gilbert_Keith
Guest
John Doran
ahh, i see now. but why should anyone believe this?
The 64 trillion dollar question!
ahh, i see now. but why should anyone believe this?
The 64 trillion dollar question!
L
Lazerlike42
Guest
It has been on more than one occasion.
It’s also not the only miracle of this sort that has ever happened. Some of those have been tested too.
S
SamCA
Guest
john doran:
For my part, I have no opinion one way or the other on the existence of parallel universes. (Well, beyond sort of hoping they exist, just because it would be neat.)
There are a variety of reasons to believe that there may be multiple worlds, but they’re based in quantum mechanical abstractions that to be honest I don’t understand all that well myself. And it’s nowhere near certain – the Many Worlds theory of quantum mechanics falls squarely in the realm of “maybe, maybe not.”
For my part, I have no opinion one way or the other on the existence of parallel universes. (Well, beyond sort of hoping they exist, just because it would be neat.)
A
AnAtheist
Guest
john doran:
Buddhism, Taoism, Janaism are often regarded as atheistic religions, because they do not believe in a divine being.
The problem is, there seems to be no dictionary definition exactly describing my mindset. Agnostic is wrong, I do think the existence of something existing is generally provable. (Agnostic btw is not “I don’t know” but “One cannot know”). Theistic is certainly wrong. Religious even wronger. Atheistic is the term closest to it.
There is no contradiction. 1. You name it, divine being. I was talking about “the divine” like the Tao. 2. I am atheistic regarding all specific deities, isn’t that general enough?
Buddhism, Taoism, Janaism are often regarded as atheistic religions, because they do not believe in a divine being.
The problem is, there seems to be no dictionary definition exactly describing my mindset. Agnostic is wrong, I do think the existence of something existing is generally provable. (Agnostic btw is not “I don’t know” but “One cannot know”). Theistic is certainly wrong. Religious even wronger. Atheistic is the term closest to it.
S
SamCA
Guest
Excellent. Do you know where I can find concrete, peer-reviewed analyses of these phenomena?
I don’t mean this sarcastically. I enjoy reading about attempts to empirically verify paranormal phenomena, cryptozoology, and the like. It’s usually bunk, but every now and then you stumble across something really interesting. (Like, for instance, the recent spate of ‘chupacabra’ shootings in Texas. I don’t know if the animals farmers have been shooting are actually chupacabra, but they’re definitely strange doglike creatures of unknown taxonomy, which is pretty astonishing on a continent this populated.)
If there has been solid scientific research on this sort of thing, I’d like to read it.
A
AnAtheist
Guest
The Eurasian said:
An organisation willing to killing unbelievers by the scores is bold enough to fake some samples.
:yawn: Prepared a pyre already?
A
AnAtheist
Guest
Gilbert Keith:
Anyhoo:
Plus: you still have to prove, why the most sensible and compassionate is automatically the true god and not just the god you wish for. That reasoning would be interesting to see.
Now it is a creator god. Last time we were talking about something divine.
Anyhoo:
That will be difficult, out of my head I can think of at least one more compassionate god than Jehova.
Plus: you still have to prove, why the most sensible and compassionate is automatically the true god and not just the god you wish for. That reasoning would be interesting to see.
L
Lazerlike42
Guest
I’m not an expert either, so you folks might just say I don’t know what I’m talking about and disregard this statement, but in truth I’ve read enough articles where this was all but explicitly stated by different physicists who do know what they’re talking about.
We didn’t just come across evidence which led us to start thinking about multiple universes. In other words, we didn’t start off with the evidence and then from the study of that conclude that there may be multiple universes. Multiple universes are more or less a theory that has been presented to try to explain different discrepencies that we have in our current understanding of things. Basically, scientists have all this data, and some of it doesn’t quite make sense. They came up with a bunch of ideas to try to explain why there are these discrepencies and problems. Some of those theories involve multiple universes. It sortof goes like this:
“George we can’t seem to reconcile these two data.”
“Well Al, I have to say we’re stuck.”
“Yeah… well but wait. What if there were multiple universes?”
“Hmmm… well, that might make some of these peoblems go away…”
Yes, I have INCREDIBLY oversimplfied it so don’t attack me fo that. I’m just trying to make a point, not give the history of multiple universes.
But the shocker is this: In a lot of cases, the data that was discovered was leading the scientists to theistic conclusions. In other words, the data pointed in directions that led to the idea of intelligent design. But, the scientists rejected this, claiming that they can’t let data go there because the conclusions the data pointed too were (and all these are words I have read in various articles) “ridiculous,” “unscientific,” and my personal favorite, “undesirable.” In other words, they ignored data because it was “undesirable” that it start to get into the realm of having a creator. Instead of going where the data pointed them, they came up with multiple universes to ‘explain away’ some of the data.
Now not all scientists have done this. In fact, many astrophysicists are theists themselves (often times citing that given the things they see in their studies, they can’t believe the universe is just an accident). Others did legitimate research on multiple universes because they didn’t just propose them as some excuse, but heard of them from others and decided to study them from the ground up to see if there is anything to them. Now most of the evidence is inconclusive, but I want to be fair and point out that multiple universes are studied legitimately, and it’s not all just some excuse. But for the most part (and I stress most, because there could be exceptions), multiple universe theories started out as an excuse to explain God out of science.
We didn’t just come across evidence which led us to start thinking about multiple universes. In other words, we didn’t start off with the evidence and then from the study of that conclude that there may be multiple universes. Multiple universes are more or less a theory that has been presented to try to explain different discrepencies that we have in our current understanding of things. Basically, scientists have all this data, and some of it doesn’t quite make sense. They came up with a bunch of ideas to try to explain why there are these discrepencies and problems. Some of those theories involve multiple universes. It sortof goes like this:
“George we can’t seem to reconcile these two data.”
“Well Al, I have to say we’re stuck.”
“Yeah… well but wait. What if there were multiple universes?”
“Hmmm… well, that might make some of these peoblems go away…”
Yes, I have INCREDIBLY oversimplfied it so don’t attack me fo that. I’m just trying to make a point, not give the history of multiple universes.
But the shocker is this: In a lot of cases, the data that was discovered was leading the scientists to theistic conclusions. In other words, the data pointed in directions that led to the idea of intelligent design. But, the scientists rejected this, claiming that they can’t let data go there because the conclusions the data pointed too were (and all these are words I have read in various articles) “ridiculous,” “unscientific,” and my personal favorite, “undesirable.” In other words, they ignored data because it was “undesirable” that it start to get into the realm of having a creator. Instead of going where the data pointed them, they came up with multiple universes to ‘explain away’ some of the data.
Now not all scientists have done this. In fact, many astrophysicists are theists themselves (often times citing that given the things they see in their studies, they can’t believe the universe is just an accident). Others did legitimate research on multiple universes because they didn’t just propose them as some excuse, but heard of them from others and decided to study them from the ground up to see if there is anything to them. Now most of the evidence is inconclusive, but I want to be fair and point out that multiple universes are studied legitimately, and it’s not all just some excuse. But for the most part (and I stress most, because there could be exceptions), multiple universe theories started out as an excuse to explain God out of science.
S
SamCA
Guest
Is it Baldur?
I always found the self-sacrifice of the Norse gods rather more compelling than the Christian one – they’re willing to die for mankind, and unlike Christ, they don’t get to come back to life afterward.
This is a good point. For all we know, God could exist but be closer to the Lovecraftian conception of, say, Azathoth than to any benevolent entity.
A
AnAtheist
Guest
No reason to withhold the sarcasm. From the links Eurasian has provided labelled “The Voice of Science”:
negrisud.it - This website is for sale! - negrisud Resources and Information.
This website is for sale! negrisud.it is your first and best source for all of the information you’re looking for. From general topics to more of what you would expect to find here, negrisud.it has it all. We hope you find what you are searching for!
www.negrisud.it
Very scientific language indeed.
S
SamCA
Guest
Do you have any specific sources where I could read more about this? Because I’ve read a fair amount on the subject, and never come across anything like this.
The Many Worlds theory did indeed arise out of certain observations found in quantum mechanical tests that defied conventional explanation, but I’ve never come across any suggestion that it was some attempt to come up with an answer other than “God did it.”
(The main one I recall was an attempt to explain why the photons in light waves seem to display an interference pattern even when there are no other photons around to interfere with them; one possible explanation was that the photon is interacting with alternate versions of itself in adjacent universes.)
L
Lazerlike42
Guest
That is either complete ignorance or blatant deception. The Catholic Church has not done so.
Have individual Catholics? Oh I’m sure they have!
But the Church hasn’t.
This reminds me of what happened when my family went to therapy. We had problems, and they kept telling me “oh you have to work out your problems go to therapy.” They encouraged me again and again to go for therapy because “therapists are good” and “they know what they’re talking about.” Well, finally we went. After three weeks of the therapist telling them that they had problems that they needed to correct, suddenly she “didn’t know what she was talking about” and therapy “doesn’t always work.”
So basically, they wanted evidence of a certain sort, but once they saw the evidence disproved their viewpoint, they claimed the evidence must have been invalid.
These samples have been checked. They have been verified. They aren’t fake. Now, as someone who puts so much faith in science, you can either accept what well educated scientists have (that these are real), or you can choose to turn your back on not only God but on science as well.
Atheists always accuse believers of being “blind” and “blindly following their beliefs” at the expense of science! Well I say to you that it is you who are blindly following your beliefs and who choose to ignore what science clearly has to tell us.
And I will have to do a search for the studies done on the stuff, but I’ll put it up then. If anyone else finds it first, cool.
L
Lazerlike42
Guest
I will poke around… most of this sort of stuff I get from reading scientific magazines or the occasional journal while I am at work with nothing better to do. It’s all info I’ve stacked up in my brain over the years. The most recent thing I can remember were two very recent issues of Scientific American (well at least one of them was… I think the other was), one which was specifically about the phenomenon of the “perfect universe” idea (the idea that every constant in the universe is so finely tuned that it all but shows the universe was designed just for us), and the other which was about how the red shift readings in the universe were out of harmony or something of the sort. They were both cover stories.
S
SamCA
Guest
Yes, but they’ve been checked and verified by people with a vested interest in coming down on the miraculous side of the fence. (At least, according to the links posted so far.)
If a scientist announced tomorrow that he had discovered something fantastic – let’s say cold fusion – the rest of the scientific community wouldn’t take him at his word, even if he was a well-credentialed and respected scientist. Hundreds of others would check his work, poking and prodding for any flaw or error, testing to make sure he wasn’t mistaken. The first step with something like that is to try your darnedest to knock it down, because if it stands up to that kind of scrutiny, it means you’ve really got something.
The first time someone suggested that they’d managed cold fusion, it didn’t stand up to that scrutiny. It turned out that the scientists involved were either being dishonest or were simply mistaken. (It is interesting to note that this year, another group has managed cold fusion, this time in such a way that it may be independantly verified.)
A discovery like the one you describe, in order to be taken seriously in terms of science, would need to be independantly tested by a wide variety of scientists, ones unafilliated with the people making the claim in the first place.
Excellent. I look forward to reading them.
L
Lazerlike42
Guest
If you’re referring to the website, then I would say: it’s not meant to be a journal or anything. It’s meant for the average joe to understand. If you read the real papers I’m sure it would have the sufficient scientific language!
If you’re referring to the telegram: The scientist was being joking around and being excited. It’s the same thing as the Greek mathematician yelling “Eureka!” when he realized something. That wasn’t very technical language either. Scientists are human, just like us. It’s sortof like when we are in school and then we realize that our teachers actually laugh and smile and have friends! Just because a fellow is a scientist it doesn’t mean everything they say has to be technical, even in the lab. If an experiment fails, people almost expect the scientists to say something like, “Unfortunately our data must be deemed inconclusive as our experiment has failed to prove our hypothesis.” The truth is, 9 times out of 10 if an experiment fails, the scientists probably just say “Damn!”
M
Maranatha
Guest
Are you an atheist, agnostic or theist? I find it amusing when atheists discuss the relative probability of certain revelations when they haven’t accepted the poof of a Creator. The evidence for Christianity is even stronger then the proofs for a Creator.
G
Gilbert_Keith
Guest
AnAtheist
Plus: you still have to prove, why the most sensible and compassionate is automatically the true god and not just the god you wish for. That reasoning would be interesting to see.
I wouldn’t dare try to prove it in this thread. It requires at least one solid tome to get the evidence down the way it should be done. I could recommend as the best study on the subject The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton, 1925.
That is, if you’re up to the challenge? I read it twice and after the second reading came back to the Catholic Church.
You can compare any of the gods you have surveyed with Christ. None holds a candlestick to him and you know it.
Plus: you still have to prove, why the most sensible and compassionate is automatically the true god and not just the god you wish for. That reasoning would be interesting to see.
I wouldn’t dare try to prove it in this thread. It requires at least one solid tome to get the evidence down the way it should be done. I could recommend as the best study on the subject The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton, 1925.
That is, if you’re up to the challenge? I read it twice and after the second reading came back to the Catholic Church.
You can compare any of the gods you have surveyed with Christ. None holds a candlestick to him and you know it.
A
AnAtheist
Guest
As amusing as theists discussing the unworthiness of other belief without having any knowledge about them?
M
Maranatha
Guest
Agreed.
- Status