Is it Rational to Believe God Exists?

[Charlemagne_III]

Now if the bible quoted something like that figure, I’d be suitably impressed. Whereas the biblical account has practically zero association with the actual events themselves.

Carl Sagan in Cosmos, 1980 A.D.

“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe…. In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased…. As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum – from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated.”

Book of Genesis: Centuries before Christ: “In the beginning God said: ‘Let there be light.’”

As astronomer Robert Jastrow pointed out in God and the Astronomers.

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

 

[Peter_Plato]

Now if the bible quoted something like that figure, I’d be suitably impressed. Whereas the biblical account has practically zero association with the actual events themselves.

That you choose to acknowledge or are perhaps completely unaware of.

 

[glendab]

Hello Charlemagne.

But it is the case that there is no scientific evidence of an infinite past. Right? Whereas there is evidence that the universe as we know came into being about 14 billion years ago.

There really is no “evidence” for the 14 billion figure. That is pure mathematical speculation based upon other speculations. We really have no hard evidence at all supporting any timeline regarding the age of things. Even carbon dating has been known to give false answers regarding the ages of things. All scientific theories are theories, not facts. Some well-educated guesses are simply more accurate, but as for the age and origin of known Universe, pure speculations backed by math that only a few understand. The answer: God did it and don’t worry about it. Worry about your eternal salvation. I think it is kinda irrational to believe all they say about the Universe these days. It tends to edge God out of the picture and elevates those like Hawkins to a scientific saint-like or guru-like status in the psedo-religion these scientists fall into.

Yeah, but who asked me? Sorry if I offend.

Glenda

 

[tonyrey]

The existence of reason itself is evidence for the existence of God.
Non-belief in God is unreasonable unless it explains how reason originated.

No one has ventured to refute this fact! To be silent implies assent or impotent dissent.

 

[Peter_Plato]

No one has ventured to refute this fact! To be silent implies assent or impotent dissent.

It strikes me that atheism depends upon something like eliminative materialism for atheism be “true” in any sense of the word. If all is simply reducible to the workings of matter and nothing but matter any gesture on the part of avowed atheists in the direction of the reality of mind or thought or ethics or subjectivity is purely an empty gesture but one which must be allowed because the implications of eliminative materialism are so alien and jarring to any thoughtful human being.

These implications like the incapacity to explain reason (and ultimately that everything simply is inexplicable brute fact) must be dressed up as “not so bad” by “allowances” like “emerging phenomena” which, in the end, are simply tales full of “sound and fury signifying nothing” and we know who it is that tells these tales: the ones who would have us believe that the very means by which we distinguish truth from tale is, itself, nothing but a wisp of nothing, which can tell us nothing. Indeed a “foolish” position that can make no distinction between a fool’s errand and a search for meaning.

 

[Aloysium]

. . . There really is no “evidence” for the 14 billion figure. . . All scientific theories are theories, not facts. Some well-educated guesses are simply more accurate, but as for the age and origin of known Universe, pure speculations backed by math that only a few understand. The answer: God did it and don’t worry about it. Worry about your eternal salvation. I think it is kinda irrational to believe all they say about the Universe these days. It tends to edge God out of the picture and elevates those like Hawkins to a scientific saint-like or guru-like status in the psedo-religion these scientists fall into. . .

I think the evidence is pretty solid if one believes our senses and intellect do connect with what is real. As you say God did it and what matters most is our relationship with Him. The problem is that science has very little to say about what is important in life and it has been misused. Hawking is good at math and physics and uses those skills to venture into intellectual territory in which those talents are useless.

The timeline provided by science conflicts only with one very narrow interpretation of scripture. Scripture is revealed truth; however you understand what constitutes a day for God, the fact is that He created all this and we ourselves. And as Tonyrey notes above, it is irrational to think that reason comes from anything other than a Ground that is rational - God.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Yeah, but who asked me? Sorry if I offend.

Glenda

No offense taken.

I like that famous quote from Pope Pius XII:

“True science to an ever-increasing degree discovers God as though God were waiting behind each closed door opened by science.”

 

[Tomdstone]

Hawking is good at math and physics and uses those skills to venture into intellectual territory in which those talents are useless.

Please explain in what intellectual territory talent in math or physics is useless.

 

[glendab]

Hello Charlemagne.

No offense taken.

I like that famous quote from Pope Pius XII:

“True science to an ever-increasing degree discovers God as though God were waiting behind each closed door opened by science.”

How about this one: which came first the scientist who discovered God’s Universe, the Universe or the God Who made it? Don’t strain your brain on this one.

Glenda

 

[Peter_Plato]

Please explain in what intellectual territory talent in math or physics is useless.

What to do with your life? Whether to act ethically or not? What constitutes moral behavior? To answer the question, “Why do I exist?”

 

[Aloysium]

Please explain in what intellectual territory talent in math or physics is useless.

I will ask you how you quantify love or beauty or truth or existence. How does one detect and measure the soul?This isn’t a novel concept. There’s even an urban myth that “nerds” are out of touch with life.

 

[stewstew03]

Please explain in what intellectual territory talent in math or physics is useless.

We can’t rely on math or physics to determine the real-world utility of math and physics.

 

[Bradski]

Book of Genesis: Centuries before Christ: “In the beginning God said: ‘Let there be light.’”

Hmmm. Not very specific is it.

How about if the story described something really small, like a cosmic egg, that existed before anything else. And everything was contained in it. Then it expanded to release all the matter of the universe. Sounds familiar? That’s what the ancient Chinese believed.

That we are all descended from one couple? Well, apart from not being correct, there aren’t many religions that don’t start with one couple. For example, the Maories believe we started with one man and one woman.

And in the Upanishad, we start with nothing, then is created the mind, then water and earth and light. Then man and from man, a woman. Deja vu all over again.

And the Hawains seem to have a fix on evolution. They believe that life started in the oceans and moved to the lands. First fish, then animals and then humans emerge. Maybe Darwin should have started his research there. Christianity simply led him astray.

 

[Tomdstone]

We can’t rely on math or physics to determine the real-world utility of math and physics.

Maybe, maybe not. But in any case it does not prove that talent in math or physics is useless in an intellectual territory.

 

[Tomdstone]

I will ask you how you quantify love or beauty or truth or existence. How does one detect and measure the soul?This isn’t a novel concept. There’s even an urban myth that “nerds” are out of touch with life.

What is logically true follows from certain logical rules and locical methodology which can be thought of as part of mathematics. In any case, skills developed in math will help one to think logically and avoid contradictions. So talent in math is not useless, but can be an aid in thinking logically and arriving at the truth of a proposition. So you are absolutely wrong to say that talent in math is useless.

 

[Tomdstone]

Carl Sagan in Cosmos, 1980 A.D.

“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe…. In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased…. As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum – from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated.”

Book of Genesis: Centuries before Christ: “In the beginning God said: ‘Let there be light.’”

As astronomer Robert Jastrow pointed out in God and the Astronomers.

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

The Big Bang could be the beginning of our universe and it is possible that it had to be created at that point. However, atheists and others have come up with different explanations. For example, one explanation is the recurrent cyclical universe theory, where the universe experiences a Big Bang and then a Big Crunch, and so on, back and forth, ad infinitum. A second explanation offered by atheists is that our universe is only one of an infinity of other universes and the Big Bang was actually only a spin off from one of the other universes out there. Things like that may be why some people adhere to the agnostic point of view, where they say that the existence of God is undecidable, with good arguments pro and con on both sides.

 

[tonyrey]

It strikes me that atheism depends upon something like eliminative materialism for atheism be “true” in any sense of the word. If all is simply reducible to the workings of matter and nothing but matter any gesture on the part of avowed atheists in the direction of the reality of mind or thought or ethics or subjectivity is purely an empty gesture but one which must be allowed because the implications of eliminative materialism are so alien and jarring to any thoughtful human being.

These implications like the incapacity to explain reason (and ultimately that everything simply is inexplicable brute fact) must be dressed up as “not so bad” by “allowances” like “emerging phenomena” which, in the end, are simply tales full of “sound and fury signifying nothing” and we know who it is that tells these tales: the ones who would have us believe that the very means by which we distinguish truth from tale is, itself, nothing but a wisp of nothing, which can tell us nothing. Indeed a “foolish” position that can make no distinction between a fool’s errand and a search for meaning.

I’m always amused by the way “emergent” is used as if it is an explanation rather than a cloak for ignorance. As far as I know no one has ever attempted to give a scientific account of the emergence of insight from neural impulses. The closest I’ve come across was on this forum:

Precisely how does one physical state **represent **

*another physical state? And what guarantee is there that this representation (whatever it may be) is a source of information? In fact what constitutes information according to the materialist?
It’s an isomorphism. A map. In human brains, it is made of neurons and axons and synapses, in fantastically huge arrays interconnected in stupendously complex patterns. But if you draw a map, say a crude drawing of the floorplan of your home, it is isomorphic to the structure of your home (from the top down, looking at the vertical walls) to the extent your drawing skills obtain.

In that case, the physical state could be grooves in the sand which you made with a stick to draw the floor plan of your home. It has meaning, because it is isomorphic; it corresponds to the plan of your house to some significant degree, where comprehending one leads to comprehension and understanding of the other, to the point (perhaps) where one is recognizable from familiarizing oneself with the other.

That’s what meaning is – isomorphism and symbolic representation. The brain does it one way, but there are innumerable ways to effect isomorphisms – the light arriving from a far away star is a kind of crude (but enormously useful) isomorphism to the chemical make up of the star – via spectroscopy we can “read the map” of the light for the star and understand something significant about its makeup. The light has meaning in that way, as an isomorphism to its source.

-TS

forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=6158208&postcount=28

So it is an entirely deterministic system. We play no part in the emergence of isomorphisms. In fact “we” are “stupendously complex patterns” of atomic particles which have no insight into, and no control over, events…
All the highlighted words refer to nothing in a world composed of nothing more than material objects!

•   	 		 	 	 That cast the world in kind of Laplacian mode, which is not my  understanding at all, or a supportable one in light of science.  Randomness and stochastic/probabilistic features of natural processes  obtain at the lowest, fundamental levels of reality, which makes for a  kind of evolving "dance", the interaction of deterministic law and  non-deterministic probabilities.

But yes, the evidence conspicuously does NOT suggest any think like the “cosmic free will” superstitions that Christians and many other theist embrace. It’s not a falsifiable idea, so there’s no way in principle to ever discredit such a notion even if it’s fals, but that said, what we do have in front of us does not support the magical thinking many apply to the subject of free will.

You are conjuring up “meaning” from nowhere in your atomic system. Atomic particles do not understand or grasp meaning; they just move in accordance with the laws of physics.

[Insert lecture about emergence and levels of description here]

!!!

It seems miraculous that atomic particles are capable of all this intangible activity! I think you are living in a totally different world from that inhabited by the vast majority of human beings… It is worth repeating that intangibles do not exist in your scheme of material things

.
Well, it depends on what you mean by intangible. You can’t “touch” magnetic force, and in that sense it’s “intangible” and yet perfectly real and actual. But intangible can also be applied to the wholly imaginary, and in that case, you’re right, I do not think wholly imaginary things exist apart from the imagination (hence the name “imaginary”).

forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=6161195&postcount=32

 

[Charlemagne_III]

The Big Bang could be the beginning of our universe and it is possible that it had to be created at that point. However, atheists and others have come up with different explanations. For example, one explanation is the recurrent cyclical universe theory, where the universe experiences a Big Bang and then a Big Crunch, and so on, back and forth, ad infinitum. A second explanation offered by atheists is that our universe is only one of an infinity of other universes and the Big Bang was actually only a spin off from one of the other universes out there. Things like that may be why some people adhere to the agnostic point of view, where they say that the existence of God is undecidable, with good arguments pro and con on both sides.

Actually, the only good scientific evidence for either side is that the universe began to exist at a moment in time. There is no good scientific evidence of a Big Crunch or a Multi-verse. These are all imaginary solutions to the origin of things cultivated by atheists to deal with the embarrassment of discovering, as Genesis says, that the universe was created. The atheist has to find an eternal cause of things somewhere other than in God.

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” Werner Heisenberg: Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.” Albert Einstein, Theories of Relativity

 

[Charlemagne_III]

And the Hawains seem to have a fix on evolution. They believe that life started in the oceans and moved to the lands. First fish, then animals and then humans emerge. Maybe Darwin should have started his research there. Christianity simply led him astray.

No, actually Genesis says the same thing about a progression of life from the simple to the more complex; that life started in the ocean and moved to the land, and finally humans emerge near the end of Creation. Sounds like Darwin to me.

If you don’t think so, read The Science of God by Gerald Schroeder, especially Chapters 3 & 4, which makes an impressive case that the evolution of the universe and life on Earth roughly approximates the six days of Creation when the word “day” is defined as an age of time rather than a 24 hour day.

Schroeder got his Ph.D. in physics from M.I.T. Just so you know he is no lightweight Creationist.

 

[Tomdstone]

There is no good scientific evidence of a Big Crunch or a Multi-verse.

Here is a paper where it is argued that, under certain assumptions, the universe will collapse in 36500 billion years or less (Big Crunch).
arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0409264v2.pdf
According to wikipedia, supporters of one of the multiverse hypotheses include Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, Max Tegmark, Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, Michio Kaku, David Deutsch, Leonard Susskind, Raj Pathria, Sean Carroll, and Alex Vilenkin.