Edited by nichodemus to tone down the aggression.
@popington
so just as christians and jews ascribe supreme importance to God and/or Jesus, and Muslims to Allah, so evolutionists do to evolution.
evolutionists credit a lot of things to evolution. they make evolution an important thing. its like a god to them, but they dont worship it.they "believe" in it.
sure they dont worship it like a god (never said they did) but they do ascribe supreme importance to it. and BTW, evolutions believe in evolution. just like religious people believe in their religion.
Although that is correct, the important distinction here is that Christians, Jews, and Muslims are all
real people. They are
not fictitious straw men created for the sole purpose of discrediting the beliefs they supposedly hold and the actual people who they are standing in for.
so the atheist "religion" teaches there is no god and that the universe came about through the big bang. this is the atheist religion.
does this make sense?
Non-theistic religions are ordinary religions without any divine object of worship. These include Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism, and some other ones. The "Atheist religion" is a straw man.
@danwar123
Incorrect for both of those. The big bang was pretty much a massive explosion which created our universe.
Not exactly. Imagine not actually being part of the universe, but still managing it at the same time.
God would’ve been created long before this universe was born, or maybe has been here forever and will be here forever. For all you know, there has been several universes before ours.
The universe is the sum totality of everything. The 'big bang' is only a brief event in its history. Although some people have speculated that this event may have occurred at the beginning of that history, there isn't any actual need for the universe to have any beginning. It only helps people feel more comfortable with the notion that everything is finite. The problem with managing it from the outside, therefore, is that there is no outside. Being "outside" would mean being nonexistent.
Cool story bro, but not exactly. He'd probably be managing the universe and it's infinity with most of His omni-powers, and the rest of His attention would be on us. Also, maybe He doesn't want to interfere with us too much.
1 It has nothing to do with interference. It's about properly engineering life and all the cosmos to fit His specifications in the first place instead of setting it up to fail and suffer.
2 If He's trying not to get involved, why does He appear to openly demand worship and servitude at the threat of eternal torment?
Souls are immortal, which is why they go to heaven as opposed to the body. Those who go to Hell are "spiritually dead" to God, so He put them in there because of a lack of other places to put them. Think of Hell as a trash can.
That is, if anything, even worse. Is a god benevolent if He intentionally brings about the demise of His creations' souls and then discards them like a used tissue?
@Doombreed
Our purpose in life is to 'search' for God and through our actions attempt to protect that form of 'communication' with him, attempt to come closer to him.
A highly dubious and unproductive purpose which is not clearly explained to us, or instinctively understood, or biologically driven, or in any way evidenced by anything in our expansive observations of the known world.
@nichodemus
I have spoken to my religious friends about it, and one of the answers they offered was that....God wants to test the faith of his followers.
Which is preposterous, because the whole point of testing anything is to learn something from the results. If we go with the OMNI-power model of God, this test is nothing more than "If I cause this to happen in exactly this way (which I know it will), will it happen in exactly the way I know it will happen?" where what happens is the ****ation/destruction of a person's soul.
As to why God, if he is all powerful, cannot solve this problem, I think the answer they gave was that God's power is in decline(?) or waning(?) or that it wasn't infinite, given that Mankind messed up or something. Something like that.
Which is also preposterous, as an OMNI-powered being would not be making such mistakes or subject to such limitations.
@WolfGirl11
Hey, Got a question for u. EVERYONE should be able to say yes to it. Do u love God?
No. I do not harbour any feelings for any real or ficticious entity going by that name or title.
@Moegreche
We might be able to make a similar move for ourselves and preserve our notion of free will in a deterministic universe. The events we cause are agent-events (rather than purely deterministic ones) but our agency itself is not an event and so can remain uncaused.
Introducing indeterminism there would mean we would be doing things literally for no reason whatsoever.
@MageGrayWolf
[...] they pretty well destroyed this argument by pointing out that we do have examples in our universe of events without cause, or at least as far as we know.
In which case, they are not valid examples.
@danwar123 again
We don't know the full powers of Satan- For all we know they could be of similar strength. Scince God has to manage the infinitely expanding universe we live in, he could only direct so much strength to fighting Satan.Also, maybe it is to test whether you are actually faithful or just pretending.
Isn't Satan supposed to be another of His perfect creations, so if Satan is influencing things, it can only be because God wants him to. And what do you mean he could only direct so much strength if God is omnipotent?
In the second case, He should already know that. He should know before you're ever born, so why make you suffer through a test you're doomed to fail?
Goodness is a standard set by god. What he says is good is good.
But if we replace the word "good" with "beneficial to all" or "not causing undue suffering", the problem remains.
