The big bang theory is bs!

[Godexists]

You know, back in the day, it was the same for ancient men.  They would look at lightning, and thunder, and volcanoes, and earthquakes, and diseases, and famine, and death and say... "Gee, I don't understand all this.

I don't use the wellknown God of the gaps argument. I base my arguments on what we DO know. Namely, to make it brief :

1. The universe had most probably a beginning.
This is supported through scientific, and philosophical reasons. Therefore it had a cause. Since beyond our universe, there was no time, no space, and no matter, that cause must be timeless, beginningless, eternal, spaceless, transcendent, invisible, personal, and incredibly powerful. Why does it need to have these characteristics ? This cause cannot exist in the time/space/material universe because then it would exist within the very universe it created. That is impossible.
Whatever caused the universe, existed beyond the universe. Since the universe had a beginning in time, and since matter and energy do not spontaneously change and arrange themselves into something new, then the best explanation for the cause of the universe is an action that was a decision.The cause must be personal because an impersonal force would be deterministic and mechanistic, not possessing free will. A mechanistic being only operates according to the programming it received from something else. But if the cause of the universe received programming from something else, then we have again not provided the answer to the cause of the universe. We have just found a middle-man. The cause had to make a choice to create and only beings who are personal can make choices.That description fits best to the God of the bible.


2. The universe is finely tuned to permit life on our planet.
Over 120 fine tune constants are know up to know, and as more time pasts, more are discovered. This might be due to chance, to physical need, or to design. Chance is a very bad explanation. Some advocate a Multiverse. But to have just one life permitting universe, you need 1 to 10^500 attempts to get it done. Thats a 1 with 500 zeros. If we put it in comparison, that in our universe, there exist around 10^80 atoms, this shows how improbable it is, that a Multiverse could explain finetuning. Beside this, the Multiverse argument does not explain away God. A mechanism needs to be in place to trigger these multiverses. It could not be by physical need, since if so, why are there many planets, which are not life permitting, but our is ? So its best explained by design. Our earth/solar/moon system is a very strong evidence. Our solar system is embedded at the right position in our galaxy, neither too close, nor too far from the center of the galaxy. Its also the only location, which alouds us to explore the universe, In a other location, and we would not see more than stellar clouds. The earth has the right distance from the sun, and so has the moon from the earth. The size of the moon, and the earth, is the right one. Our planet has the needed minerals, and water. It has the right atmosphere, and a ozon protecting mantle. Jupiter attracts all asteroids , avoiding these to fall to the earth, and make life impossible. The earths magnetic field protects us from the deadly rays of the sun. The velocity of rotation of the earth is just right. And so is the axial tilt of the earth. Beside this, volcano activities, earth quakes, the size of the crust of the earth, and more over 70 different paramenters must be just right. To believe, all these are just right by chance, needs a big leap of faith. This is indeed maibe the strongest argument for theism.

3. Life. Abiogenesis has not been able to explain the existence of life on earth.
Science cannot explain it. There are strong reasons to believe, a natural origin is not probable, and a bad explanation. First of all, why whould dead rocks need to evolve, to create life ? Secondly, just one living cell is more complex than the most complex machine created by man. A living eukaryotic cell contains many hundreds of thousands of different complex parts, including various motor proteins. These parts must be assembled correctly to produce a living cell, the most complex ‘machine’ in the universe—far more complex than a Cray supercomputer.DNA molecules carry information . Information is always created by a mind. There i no natural mechanism known to man, to create information. Information is by essence spiritual, and not physical. There is no bridge to cross the gulf from material to spiritual. Even through millions of years of evolution. Its not possible.

http://www.icr.org/article/einsteins...tion-cross-it/

On the one side, we find the real world of objects, events, and tensional spacetime relations. On the other side, we find fully abstract representations that contain information about the material world. That articulate information is abstracted first by our senses, secondarily by our bodily actions, and tertiarily by our ability to use one or more particular languages . Between the two realms we find what appears to be an uncrossable gulf.


A small part of the evolutionists' problem is that hard objects are never observed spontaneously to transform themselves (on their own recognizance) into abstract ideas.

4. The moral argument, and value of life.
Life has no value. Everthing is permissible. There is no such thing as right and wrong because there is no all knowing and all powerful Creator to define what is good and what is bad. It becomes society who tries to define it. What does that matter though if the people making laws define right from wrong. They are just as human as any other person in the world. The only thing that truly exists is personal preference. What Hitler, Stalin, or any other mass murderer did was not wrong at all. They simply had a different personal preference than you do. The point is, you shouldn't tell anyone that they are wrong or even right because they aren't either of those things. You can believe that its wrong, but you have no place to ground it. People can do anything they want to do without getting punished for their actions if the world lived consistently with the belief that God doesn't exist. How do you explain where guilt comes from? How do you explain why all people in the world have this feeling called a conscience that seems to tell them that something is wrong, such as murder. How come people feel a heavy weight on their emotions called guilt when they do something wrong, such as lie and steal, and the best thing to do to take the weight off themselves is to tell the truth and/or ask for forgiveness. If God doesn't exist, then how could you rationally explain all that?


5. Without God, life has no reason to be, there is no ultimate goal
There is no purpose to life. Life has no ultimate goal. There is no reason for living. Sacrifice for someone else's life would be stupid. This argument shows that an atheist lives inconsistently with their own belief. If a murderer who believed murder to be ok, came into your house to brutally murder you and your family, would you think that HE is wrong to do that? If you said no, that he isn't doing any thing wrong, then you would be living consistantly with your beliefs. But if you said yes, then you would live as if there were objective morals. But if there is no god to define objective morality then there is only subjective morality. So by saying it is wrong makes it only your opinion, but not the murderers opinion. You would be "pushing your<br style="position: static !important; ">morality on him" which is the opposite of what you believe. You probably believe that "it is wrong to push your morality on another person." Even that statement right there is another objective moral statement. In other words you express your opinions, but don't always live by them.



6. Religious experiences and miracles
What ever culture you go into, people are incurably religious. In every culture you see three things. 1) Everyone, except the atheist, worships a being higher than themselves. 2) Everyone has a morality they cannot keep. 3) Everyone is psychologically unsatisfied. People feel an emptiness in themselves that they want to fill. If the material world was the only thing that existed and if all your material needs were met, you should be satesfied right? But how come people who have the most wealth are usually the most unhappy. They constantly want more and more. And how can you explain the millions of people in the world who say they have felt the closeness of God in their lives? I personally am included with them. I have felt God's presence in my life on a consistent basis. Now how can you rationally explain that without God's existence? There are many people in the world who report seeing miracles. In other words there are people who say that they saw a situation occur where there is no naturalistic explanation for it. I personally know people who have had miraculous situations occur, such as immediate healings. You might argue that science will someday explain those things, but right now you can't explain them. The best explaination is God, because if God created the world then it wouldn't be hard to believe that he can intervene supernaturally in this world.



 

It must be the act of a supernatural being".  We know how all of those work now.  And we know more about the universe than we ever have in the history of civilization.  And we continue to learn more.  What that has done is pushed any notion of the necessity of God as an explanatory force into oblivion.

How so ?

  We are smarter now.  God was a theory that helped the human race in its infancy.  We grew up.  Maybe you need to grow up too.  If all you are going to stick to is the start of the universe (an event for which NO current causative evidence is available)

The very only fact that the universe most probably had a beginning, makes it reasonable to ask : What caused it into being ?

God is the EASIEST possibility, but it is certainly NOT the one that makes the most sense.

Which one does ?

 

In fact, the God theory creates more questions than it answers.  If you didn't like believing in God so much, you might be able to see it.   Your bias hurts your ability to objectively look at the evidence.

You have not shown your interpretation of the evidence, so far. Please present it.

13.7 billion years ago, 2 larger, circular shaped universes collided together in a giant explosion.

Where these universes eternal, or had they also a beginning ? If they had a beginning, you shifted the question about the cause backwards. If you assert two universes which were there before eternally, you are getting in serious philosophical problems. Beside this, if time were created at the Big BAng, no physical event could have happened before, since there was no before.



 

In that explosion, that we call the Big Bang, very small particles of matter flew off in all directions.  At that time, each particle of matter had mass, and the natural property of mass holds that there is a small gravitational force associated with it.That force causes the small particles to coalesce together and form small atoms.  Hydrogen forms first and is significantly larger than the original particles.  The larger hydrogen atoms have a larger gravitational pull associated with them, and they start to pull toward each other.  Over thousands and thousands of years, enough hydrogen clusters together that the sheer size of the ball of hydrogen reaches a critical stage and begins to heat up.  After that, nuclear fusion begins.  For a time, the star burns hydrogen and turns it into helium.  But then it runs out of hydrogen, it starts to burn the helium. Once it does that, the star gets bigger, and then when it runs out of helium, it starts making larger atoms, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and so on, until it reaches lead, at which time it blows up, scattering all the elements of our planet into the universe, where the natural force of gravity acts again to bring them together to form Earth.  Somewhere in the universe (whether it be on our planet, or another, or a star, or something we do not know yet), long chains of carbon based (organic) molecules began to form together.  Once on earth, those molecules began to thrive in a process (called evolution) which led to all the different varieties of life... all the way to us.

this mass had to be extremely fine tuned, and so the gravitational force , and the relation of the gravitational force, to the strong, weak, and electro magnetic force of the atoms. How was it possible, that these had just the right properties ?

http://www.reasons.org/fine-tuning-life-universe

strong nuclear force constant
if larger: no hydrogen; nuclei essential for life would be unstable
if smaller: no elements other than hydrogen

weak nuclear force constant
if larger: too much hydrogen converted to helium in big bang, hence too much heavy element material made by star burning; no expulsion of heavy elements from stars
if smaller: too little helium produced from big bang, hence too little heavy element material made by star burning; no expulsion of heavy elements from stars

gravitational force constant
if larger: stars would be too hot and would burn up quickly and unevenly|
if smaller: stars would be so cool that nuclear fusion would not ignite, thus no heavy element production

electromagnetic force constant
if larger: insufficient chemical bonding; elements more massive than boron would be unstable to fission
if smaller: insufficient chemical bonding

ratio of electromagnetic force constant to gravitational force constant
if larger: no stars less than 1.4 solar masses, hence short and uneven stellar burning
if smaller: no stars more than 0.8 solar masses, hence no heavy element production

ratio of electron to proton mass
if larger: insufficient chemical bonding
if smaller: insufficient chemical bonding

ratio of number of protons to number of electrons
if larger: electromagnetism dominates gravity preventing galaxy, star, and planet formation
if smaller: electromagnetism dominates gravity preventing galaxy, star, and planet formation

Now, I know that your "Magic sky man snapped his fingers and everything appeared" is an EASIER hypothesis

no, its definitively a more rational hypothesis. YOurs runs in serious problems.  1. there were no events before the big bang, because there was no time. 2. do you imagine the odds of finely tune the constants to have the right expansion rate of the big bang, and the atomic forces, and magnetic forces ? what do you suggest to explain such a incredible fine tuning. Chance ?

Why do you think it is any better than any other creation myth out there?

because it correlates with scientific findings. While others, don't.

The archeological evidence of what?  Of places?  Harry Potter takes place in London, does that make any of the books real?  And the same goes for people.

We all know Harry Potter is fictional. Pilatus, Agrippa, the apostle paul, Jesus, were not. They were real people, which influenced the world as anybody else in world history, and so the life of millions of people. And it was to the better.

You ask me if I want to know the truth, and the answer is a resounding YES.  But the only way I know of to arrive at the truth is to use my reasoning and logic to assess your claims in the exact same way I use it to assess other claims.

so explain then please, how the incredible fine tuning of the universe can be explained rationally ?

[Godexists]

You are wasting your time in this thread.

You too. You've not answered my question.

[Godexists]

Without resorting to words like "spiritual," explain why you think electrochemical processes in the brain and nervous system would be able to continue after the demise of the physical body.  I know enough about physiology and neurology to think that such a thing is very, very unlikely indeed.

there are enough testimonies of people which had out of the body experiences, that proves our soul and spirit can exist without our body.

[Godexists]

Not interested in spending eternity with a god that's too weak to deal with My imperfection.

He dealt with it, and resolved your, my, our problem. But its upon us to accept his offer of forgiveness, and eternal life.

I don't think there's anyone out there to forgive them, and I don't think "forever life" is possible.

how can you be so sure about this ?

God's will is that all human kind might be saved, and should not go to hell.

Then your god shouldn't have f%cking created a hell!  If it did create one, its will that all humankind be saved is a very weak will indeed.

I believe God did not create hell for human kind, but for the fallen angels. But after we became sinners as well, we are all on the same road to hell as well. I believe the only way to be saved is the one proposed in the bible.

Its NEVER Gods fault, when somebody ends up in hell.

Wrong.  If hell exists, your god is 100% responsible for all the suffering there

No, he is not. He presented the escape, so that nobody needs to end up there. But he will not obligate anyone to be saved. Its your choice , you need to convert yourself, and accept Gods offer of forgiveness.

[Cyberia]

They discovered FOSSILIZED soft tissue and FOSSILIZED blood VESSELS inside a T-rex femur.  They, sadly, had to break the bone to ship it and found it inside the marrow cavity, where it had been nicely preserved.  It allowed them to speculate that it was a female due to the nature of the structures within.  They have since gone back and broken open a number of museum bones and found similar structures in a few other dinosaur species.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaurus#Soft_tissue

Creationists have an on-going problem with intellectual honesty and intentionally misrepresent this.

Flexible, bifurcating blood vessels and fibrous but elastic bone matrix tissue were recognized.

I don't think you have an on-going problem with intellectual honesty but I am curious why you claimed the soft tissue was fossilized when it says right there in the wiki article you provided that the samples were flexible and elastic. Unless we are using different definitions of the word fossilized.

Mea Culpa.  There has been some new additions since I last read that part, and I didn't read it last night, like I should have.  Nevertheless, even on a re-read it doesn't sound like they found intact soft-tissue.  Mostly it's mineralized, with some elastic proteins like collagen (surprisingly) surviving which allowed them to visualize the blood vessels and even individual cells.  They didn't break it open and have blood run out, according to my reading.

The line that made me lean towards that interpretation is this (bolded by me):

In addition, microstructures resembling blood cells were found inside the matrix and vessels. The structures bear resemblance to ostrich blood cells and vessels. Whether an unknown process, distinct from normal fossilization, preserved the material, or the material is original, the researchers do not know, and they are careful not to make any claims about preservation.

But I take my lumps when I error.  Doh.

EDIT: Fail again on my part for using 'url' instead of 'quote'

[DVZ3]

2. The universe is finely tuned to permit life on our planet.


5. Without God, life has no reason to be, there is no ultimate goal

The answer to 2 is easy... We exist so the probability for life to form when there are billions of stars along with billions of other galaxies to take into consideration along with the probability that there could be an infinite number of universes.  This to me says the opposite of 'grand design' but rather 'grand number of chances to happen'.  Also, conversly to what you beleive, physics can take us back to the beginning of the big bang without the need for god.  Doesn't this notion alone bother you!?  That since natual laws of nature can take us all the way back to what we know today as the BBT, what room doesn that leave for a god?  It doesn't, you insert the god notion because of your emotional attachment in 5....

5 sounds like to me like you need the emotional satisfaction of wanting there to be a god for life to have a purpose.  I hear this all too often from theists and is primitive humans emotional response to the age old 'why are we here' question.  If you can learn to separate appeal to emotion to rational thought and obvious natural process with power in numbers working for it to happen, you might understand how science works and then know why supernatural is never and will never be the answer to natural occurances; including cause/effect of the big bang.

[Azdgari]

Speaking of astronomical odds, what were the odds that God would plan and create the universe to be exactly the way that it is?  That's a lot of particles' paths to chart out.

[Emergence]

[Snip: T-Rex soft tissue talk]

If you are interested in more detailed info on this:

Soft-Tissue Vessels and Cellular Preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex; Schweitzer et al.; Science 307; 2005; link to PDF

Analyses of Soft Tissue from Tyrannosaurus rex Suggest the Presence of Protein; Schweitzer et al.; Science 316; 2007; link to PDF

Dinosaur Peptides Suggest Mechanisms of Protein Survival; San Antonio et al.; PLoS ONE 6; 2011; link to HTML

[jaimehlers]

Godexists:

1.

Your belief that the universe had a Beginning is not supported through scientific evidence and is speculation.  The Big Bang was a beginning, but not necessarily the Beginning, as you claim.

Your belief that there was no time, no space, and no matter outside the universe is nothing but speculation.  There is no scientific evidence one way or the other; if there was something outside the Big Bang singularity, it was either pushed outward via the expansion of space (and probably faster than the speed of light, meaning we could not possibly see it) that came with the Big Bang, or destroyed due to the phenomenal outflow of energy from the Big Bang.  But whether there was or wasn't, there is no evidence whatsoever to support it either way.  None.  You cannot make it true simply by restating it until people get tired of arguing with you because you don't actually listen to what they're trying to say.

Therefore, your belief that there was a cause which was "timeless, beginningless, eternal, spaceless, transcendent, invisible, personal, and incredibly powerful" is, again, speculation.  You have no evidence to demonstrate that this is a fact.  Speculation can be interesting, but you cannot prove speculation - any speculation - true without evidence.  And you certainly cannot by presenting it as a logical argument and trying to convince people to think of it as the most reasonable explanation, because when you're talking about speculation, how reasonable something seems is in the eye of the beholder.

2.

The same goes for your argument about the fine-tuning of the universe.  The fact that we call it fine-tuning does not mean it was done by some intelligence.  Evolution can be thought of as a way for organisms to automatically fine-tune themselves to enhance their likelihood of surviving and reproducing, but that does not mean that some intelligence is necessarily responsible.  We have evidence of a tendency for the universe to go from a less-ordered state (the expanding ball of exotic matter right after the Big Bang) to a more-ordered state (planets, stars, galaxies, etc), and we have no evidence that there was some guiding hand behind it.  Therefore, it is reasonable to look for a self-organizing principle to create that tendency instead of simply assuming it had to have been purposefully set into motion.  And the same applies to the nature of physical constants which creationists like to refer to as fine-tuning.  It is inherently unreasonable to jump straight to the idea that some being set it all up deliberately without even seriously considering any other alternatives, which you have been doing all along.

3.

Regarding the origins of life on Earth, abiogenesis is a theory that's being developed.  It isn't a well-developed theory, like gravity, evolution, and atoms.  And there are other theories as well[1], which are also being developed.  Furthermore, your "reasons to believe a natural origin is not possible" are seriously flawed.  For example, you refer to "dead rocks", except that this is seriously misleading.  How can something that was not originally alive be dead?  Abiogenesis refers to inorganic molecules combining and eventually forming organic molecules.  As another example, you refer to the complexity of living cells, except that you are referring to the complexity of modern living cells, without considering that the first living cells, however long ago they existed, were almost certainly very basic.  They developed their complexity over millions, possibly billions of years; they did not start out being complex simply because single-celled organisms today are complex in nature.  And you state information is spiritual, except this is utter nonsense.  Information is inherently nothing more than a description of something[2].  The fact that someone describes something that doesn't exist, or an abstract concept, does not make that description 'spiritual'.

4.

This is nothing more than the statement that life is meaningless without something to provide an absolute set of morals, and an attempt to present the conscience as being an expression of that absolute morality.  Except that it is not.  Humans did not start out with a well-developed conscience or feelings of guilt.  In fact, evidence based on the oldest known human societies clearly demonstrates that the opposite is the case.  People did whatever they felt they could get away with, and didn't really care that much about what it cost other people.  It was only when you had tribal groupings, an extension of the family, that this started to change; tribes would not tolerate behavior by individuals which threatened the tribe, and that was the fundamental beginning of morality, because people who wanted the protection and support of the tribe had to live by the rules the tribe set for itself.  And morality evolved from there, based on the societies which worked the best overall.

5.

You again presume that an atheist's belief must be that nothing matters and that people should be able to do whatever they want.  And you are fundamentally and utterly wrong in so doing.  A person does not have to have some artificial "ultimate goal" imposed by religion to agree to live under rules and to act with morality and decency towards each other.  You say that an atheist should blithely accept someone who wants to murder them and their family because you think that atheism is about saying nothing is wrong; I say that this shows how little you understand, while thinking you understand everything.  If someone tried to murder me, I would stop them, because I do not want to die.  If someone tried to murder a member of my family, I would stop them, because I do not want them to die, because they matter to me.  The fact that the murderer thinks he has a good reason to do so is immaterial; the desire to survive trumps another's desire to kill[3].  Morality is not some static thing that can only exist if it is imposed from above.  It exists within us and grows as we do, and that is a far greater thing than your belief in an "ultimate goal".

6.

People are not incurably religious.  Religion, by its very nature, is cultural.  Therefore, if a culture does not incorporate religion (by explicitly approving or disapproving of it), then religion within that culture starts to wither.  We can easily observe this in societies today; societies which don't really care about religious belief have a decreasing percentage of believers within them.

People do not invariably worship things[4] higher than themselves.  The Sun is the mightiest thing in the solar system.  Without it, none of us could exist.  Yet sun worship has all-but-vanished.

And people can and do keep to their moral beliefs.  For example, I made a vow to myself (and only myself) when I was younger that I would never start smoking.  And I kept that vow.  According to you, I should not have been able to keep to that morality on my own, yet I did.  So it is not everyone, and it probably is not even most people.  Some people, sure.  But those people would have done that regardless of religion.  Religion itself does not enforce morality.

And as for a feeling of emptiness, where did you get this from?  The fact that people who have too much wealth for their needs are not satisfied does not demonstrate some kind of "psychological emptiness", because people who have enough wealth for their needs tend to be much more satisfied than those who do not have enough or those who have too much.  The reason you feel God's presence in your life does not prove anything, because you cannot demonstrate that it is not just in your mind.  And the various miracles reported are due to the correlation fallacy; someone prayed for something, and it happened, thus it must have been God.  Except that this rate of 'miracles' is no different than what one would expect if it were simply random chance; it is only that the times when people pray and nothing happens, or when people do not pray and something happens, are not counted in the totals.

----

These six arguments are flawed, based on nothing but your own personal, emotional, beliefs.  Your intellect is rationalizing those emotional beliefs so that you can have a stable and solid worldview that supports those emotional beliefs.  But the rationalizations and assumptions you use are not convincing to anyone who does not share those same emotional beliefs.  That is why you said that someone must "open their heart", is it not?  Your arguments are not themselves convincing; they are designed to be emotionally appealing in order to attract people to share your beliefs.  That is why you fail so badly at convincing people who use rational skepticism in a discussion, because they can and do pinpoint flaws in your intellectual rationalizations, which you subsequently ignore because you convince yourself that they would not have listened anyway and thus are not worth listening to.  The more you try to reinforce this failure, the more time and energy you end up throwing away for nothing.

It's that simple.

1.	Such as panspermia, to name one.
2.	If there are six bottles sitting on a wall, stating that is information; that does not make it 'spiritual' in nature.
3.	Or, to put it another way, people who are running away from people trying to kill them will always run faster than the ones trying to kill them.
4.	You may say a 'being', but this is not accurate, because some people worship many beings, others worship things they view as mighty.

[jetson]

jaimehlers,

No offense, but you have the patience of a saint.  Honestly, I'm not sure how you keep such patience when it seems there is no end to the ignorance and blissful apathy towards pretty much anything you say.   

[jtp56]

Godexists:

1.

Your belief that the universe had a Beginning is not supported through scientific evidence and is speculation.  The Big Bang was a beginning, but not necessarily the Beginning, as you claim.

Your belief that there was no time, no space, and no matter outside the universe is nothing but speculation.  There is no scientific evidence one way or the other; if there was something outside the Big Bang singularity, it was either pushed outward via the expansion of space (and probably faster than the speed of light, meaning we could not possibly see it) that came with the Big Bang, or destroyed due to the phenomenal outflow of energy from the Big Bang.  But whether there was or wasn't, there is no evidence whatsoever to support it either way.  None.  You cannot make it true simply by restating it until people get tired of arguing with you because you don't actually listen to what they're trying to say.

Therefore, your belief that there was a cause which was "timeless, beginningless, eternal, spaceless, transcendent, invisible, personal, and incredibly powerful" is, again, speculation.  You have no evidence to demonstrate that this is a fact.  Speculation can be interesting, but you cannot prove speculation - any speculation - true without evidence.  And you certainly cannot by presenting it as a logical argument and trying to convince people to think of it as the most reasonable explanation, because when you're talking about speculation, how reasonable something seems is in the eye of the beholder.

2.

The same goes for your argument about the fine-tuning of the universe.  The fact that we call it fine-tuning does not mean it was done by some intelligence.  Evolution can be thought of as a way for organisms to automatically fine-tune themselves to enhance their likelihood of surviving and reproducing, but that does not mean that some intelligence is necessarily responsible.  We have evidence of a tendency for the universe to go from a less-ordered state (the expanding ball of exotic matter right after the Big Bang) to a more-ordered state (planets, stars, galaxies, etc), and we have no evidence that there was some guiding hand behind it.  Therefore, it is reasonable to look for a self-organizing principle to create that tendency instead of simply assuming it had to have been purposefully set into motion.  And the same applies to the nature of physical constants which creationists like to refer to as fine-tuning.  It is inherently unreasonable to jump straight to the idea that some being set it all up deliberately without even seriously considering any other alternatives, which you have been doing all along.

3.

Regarding the origins of life on Earth, abiogenesis is a theory that's being developed.  It isn't a well-developed theory, like gravity, evolution, and atoms.  And there are other theories as well[1], which are also being developed.  Furthermore, your "reasons to believe a natural origin is not possible" are seriously flawed.  For example, you refer to "dead rocks", except that this is seriously misleading.  How can something that was not originally alive be dead?  Abiogenesis refers to inorganic molecules combining and eventually forming organic molecules.  As another example, you refer to the complexity of living cells, except that you are referring to the complexity of modern living cells, without considering that the first living cells, however long ago they existed, were almost certainly very basic.  They developed their complexity over millions, possibly billions of years; they did not start out being complex simply because single-celled organisms today are complex in nature.  And you state information is spiritual, except this is utter nonsense.  Information is inherently nothing more than a description of something[2].  The fact that someone describes something that doesn't exist, or an abstract concept, does not make that description 'spiritual'.

4.

This is nothing more than the statement that life is meaningless without something to provide an absolute set of morals, and an attempt to present the conscience as being an expression of that absolute morality.  Except that it is not.  Humans did not start out with a well-developed conscience or feelings of guilt.  In fact, evidence based on the oldest known human societies clearly demonstrates that the opposite is the case.  People did whatever they felt they could get away with, and didn't really care that much about what it cost other people.  It was only when you had tribal groupings, an extension of the family, that this started to change; tribes would not tolerate behavior by individuals which threatened the tribe, and that was the fundamental beginning of morality, because people who wanted the protection and support of the tribe had to live by the rules the tribe set for itself.  And morality evolved from there, based on the societies which worked the best overall.

5.

You again presume that an atheist's belief must be that nothing matters and that people should be able to do whatever they want.  And you are fundamentally and utterly wrong in so doing.  A person does not have to have some artificial "ultimate goal" imposed by religion to agree to live under rules and to act with morality and decency towards each other.  You say that an atheist should blithely accept someone who wants to murder them and their family because you think that atheism is about saying nothing is wrong; I say that this shows how little you understand, while thinking you understand everything.  If someone tried to murder me, I would stop them, because I do not want to die.  If someone tried to murder a member of my family, I would stop them, because I do not want them to die, because they matter to me.  The fact that the murderer thinks he has a good reason to do so is immaterial; the desire to survive trumps another's desire to kill[3].  Morality is not some static thing that can only exist if it is imposed from above.  It exists within us and grows as we do, and that is a far greater thing than your belief in an "ultimate goal".

6.

People are not incurably religious.  Religion, by its very nature, is cultural.  Therefore, if a culture does not incorporate religion (by explicitly approving or disapproving of it), then religion within that culture starts to wither.  We can easily observe this in societies today; societies which don't really care about religious belief have a decreasing percentage of believers within them.

People do not invariably worship things[4] higher than themselves.  The Sun is the mightiest thing in the solar system.  Without it, none of us could exist.  Yet sun worship has all-but-vanished.

And people can and do keep to their moral beliefs.  For example, I made a vow to myself (and only myself) when I was younger that I would never start smoking.  And I kept that vow.  According to you, I should not have been able to keep to that morality on my own, yet I did.  So it is not everyone, and it probably is not even most people.  Some people, sure.  But those people would have done that regardless of religion.  Religion itself does not enforce morality.

And as for a feeling of emptiness, where did you get this from?  The fact that people who have too much wealth for their needs are not satisfied does not demonstrate some kind of "psychological emptiness", because people who have enough wealth for their needs tend to be much more satisfied than those who do not have enough or those who have too much.  The reason you feel God's presence in your life does not prove anything, because you cannot demonstrate that it is not just in your mind.  And the various miracles reported are due to the correlation fallacy; someone prayed for something, and it happened, thus it must have been God.  Except that this rate of 'miracles' is no different than what one would expect if it were simply random chance; it is only that the times when people pray and nothing happens, or when people do not pray and something happens, are not counted in the totals.

----

These six arguments are flawed, based on nothing but your own personal, emotional, beliefs.  Your intellect is rationalizing those emotional beliefs so that you can have a stable and solid worldview that supports those emotional beliefs.  But the rationalizations and assumptions you use are not convincing to anyone who does not share those same emotional beliefs.  That is why you said that someone must "open their heart", is it not?  Your arguments are not themselves convincing; they are designed to be emotionally appealing in order to attract people to share your beliefs.  That is why you fail so badly at convincing people who use rational skepticism in a discussion, because they can and do pinpoint flaws in your intellectual rationalizations, which you subsequently ignore because you convince yourself that they would not have listened anyway and thus are not worth listening to.  The more you try to reinforce this failure, the more time and energy you end up throwing away for nothing.

It's that simple.

1.	Such as panspermia, to name one.
2.	If there are six bottles sitting on a wall, stating that is information; that does not make it 'spiritual' in nature.
3.	Or, to put it another way, people who are running away from people trying to kill them will always run faster than the ones trying to kill them.
4.	You may say a 'being', but this is not accurate, because some people worship many beings, others worship things they view as mighty.

1. It was Einsteins theory of relativity that demanded a beginning to the universe.  Until that time, the common belief was that matter was being continuously manufactured somehow.   The current model requires  dark matter to give us the mass required to sustain an expanding universe.  Dark matter has never been observed or proven, kinda like God.  (Go to NASA not Wiki to learn about Dark Matter, sorry, I got blasted for dissing Wiki on previous posts).

An aside: When you say "evidence" to support something are you referring to observational science or historical science?  A huge difference!  Observational science is done under a controlled environment with tight experimental guidelines and uses the scientific method.  Historical science uses circumstantial evidence (for example: fossils) and eyewitness accounts (for example: the gospels).  Neither God, Jesus, the BBT, or evolution can be proved using observational science.  Observational science is why we have the medical advances we have, refrigeration, cars, planes, trains, internet, etc. etc. etc.  Historical science is what it is.  I see through these posts that both sides confuse science.  We/You use observational science to "prove" historical science, not good for either side.

2.  Fine tuning?  Creation starts with perfection and it goes down hill form there (after the fall), kinda like the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.  Evolution starts with chaos and goes against the 2nd Law.  I disagree that "we have no evidence that there was some guiding hand behind it."  If you look at geologic science coupled with observational science of volcanoes, tsunamis, and other earth catastrophes, the Biblical Record is more and more accurate.  Read a book by your own guy, who we think died an atheist, at least he was an atheist when he wrote his books, by the name of Derek Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record; London McMillllen, 1981, and later in 1993: The New Catastrophism.  I'm referring to indirect proof of Noah's flood here by your guy(s).  Ager insisted that creationists not use his work or there would be hell to pay.  Well he's dead now so.......

3.  "Abiogenesis is a theory that's being developed...."  I have debunked the evidence used for this on other posts, at least those sited on Wiki.  The Bible is not being developed by the way.

4.  You are borrowing morality from the Judeo-Christian ethic.  People jumping in front of a bullet for their family member wouldn't transfer their genes.  The strong would survive per Darwin.  Does strength equate to morality?

5.  Again, your morals came from some teaching.  Morals aren't in genes.  Why aren't there morals in the animal kingdoms.  How did a gene all of a sudden realize it's not good to eat your young.  Oops, I forgot about abortion, never mind.

6.  I like a cigar now and then....dang.

[jetson]

1. It was Einsteins theory of relativity that demanded a beginning to the universe.  Until that time, the common belief was that matter was being continuously manufactured somehow.   The current model requires  dark matter to give us the mass required to sustain an expanding universe.  Dark matter has never been observed or proven, kinda like God.  (Go to NASA not Wiki to learn about Dark Matter, sorry, I got blasted for dissing Wiki on previous posts).

An aside: When you say "evidence" to support something are you referring to observational science or historical science?  A huge difference!  Observational science is done under a controlled environment with tight experimental guidelines and uses the scientific method.  Historical science uses circumstantial evidence (for example: fossils) and eyewitness accounts (for example: the gospels).  Neither God, Jesus, the BBT, or evolution can be proved using observational science.  Observational science is why we have the medical advances we have, refrigeration, cars, planes, trains, internet, etc. etc. etc.  Historical science is what it is. I see through these posts that both sides confuse science. We/You use observational science to "prove" historical science, not good for either side.

2.  Fine tuning?  Creation starts with perfection and it goes down hill form there (after the fall), kinda like the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.  Evolution starts with chaos and goes against the 2nd Law.  I disagree that "we have no evidence that there was some guiding hand behind it."  If you look at geologic science coupled with observational science of volcanoes, tsunamis, and other earth catastrophes, the Biblical Record is more and more accurate.  Read a book by your own guy, who we think died an atheist, at least he was an atheist when he wrote his books, by the name of Derek Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record; London McMillllen, 1981, and later in 1993: The New Catastrophism.  I'm referring to indirect proof of Noah's flood here by your guy(s).  Ager insisted that creationists not use his work or there would be hell to pay.  Well he's dead now so.......

3.  "Abiogenesis is a theory that's being developed...." I have debunked the evidence used for this on other posts, at least those sited on Wiki.  The Bible is not being developed by the way.

4.  You are borrowing morality from the Judeo-Christian ethic.  People jumping in front of a bullet for their family member wouldn't transfer their genes.  The strong would survive per Darwin.  Does strength equate to morality?

5.  Again, your morals came from some teaching.  Morals aren't in genes.  Why aren't there morals in the animal kingdoms.  How did a gene all of a sudden realize it's not good to eat your young.  Oops, I forgot about abortion, never mind.

6.  I like a cigar now and then....dang.

I just thought it would be fun to highlight random stuff rom your reply.  It turns out that somehow, it's all bullshit!  Nice work.

[JeffPT]

I don't use the wellknown God of the gaps argument. I base my arguments on what we DO know. Namely, to make it brief :

I bolded this to show how you are NOT using what you DO know.  You are using a starting point of what we know, and then making assertions after that.  Just look at what you wrote...

Whatever caused the universe, existed beyond the universe.

A good start.  And the term "whatever" could mean anything at all.

Since the universe had a beginning in time, and since matter and energy do not spontaneously change and arrange themselves into something new, then the best explanation for the cause of the universe is an action that was a decision.

This is simply an assertion.  You have no evidence of what you are saying here, you are just saying "it's the best explanation"... just like the god of the gaps argument which says "I don't understand how X works, so I am going to say the best explanation is Y".  That IS the god of the gaps argument.  You are not making an evidence based response, you are just admitting we have no knowledge of what exists outside our universe and shoving a really bad guess in.  Did you even READ the post I wrote?  Did you even LOOK at the possibility I showed you?  The idea that the universe was 'most likely a decision' is absolutely horseshit, no matter how much you sit there shaking your head and feeling confident in your foolishness.  You're absolutely wrong.  It is NOT the best explanation.  It's an absolute guess based on a lack of scientific evidence.  God Of The GAPS. 

The cause must be personal because an impersonal force would be deterministic and mechanistic, not possessing free will.

And I am asserting that the force that caused the universe is not only impersonal, but completely natural and without the ability to 'decide' anything.   

The cause had to make a choice to create and only beings who are personal can make choices.That description fits best to the God of the bible.

You keep saying this stuff as if there are no other options.  You're just wrong.  Without evidence, there are literally trillions of options.  Most of which we may not even be able to imagine.  And then you take the massive leap between the notion that the universe needs a cause, and that cause is the God of the bible is a completely unbelievable leap.  Honestly, you can't really believe that this is a good argument, can you? 

2. The universe is finely tuned to permit life on our planet.

No.  Not even close.  A small portion of the surface of our planet is where human life is capable of surviving.  Not underground, or up in the sky, or in the oceans, or at the poles... but somewhere in the middle regions.  Outside of that little, tiny, microscopic section of the UNIVERSE, life hasn't been found.  If you are going to say that our universe is finely tuned for life, then you have to face the fact that 99.99999% of the universe is hostile to life.  Let me use an analogy along with some facts...  There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of our planet.  And in all likelihood, there are planets around most of them.  What you are trying to tell us... is that all the sand in the world was made for one species of life that lives on 1/3 of the outer surface of this one little spec of dust, revolving around 1 of the grains of sand?  I have to wonder what sort of God would be stupid enough to do that? 

The other possibility is that life begins in places where it is conducive for life to begin, and that is why we have yet to find it anywhere else.  Simply because no other planet that we have yet found has the right conditions that would allow for life to start. 

3. Life. Abiogenesis has not been able to explain the existence of life on earth.

Um... yes it does.  It explains it quite well.  It says that due to the conditions on the early earth, and through as yet understood natural forces, life arose.  It explains things perfectly.  What you MEANT to say is that it hasn't been fully proven yet.  If that is a problem for you, then perhaps you should look at your own completely evidence-less theory that the invisible man started it all.  A theory which used to be en vogue thousands of years ago when people had no clue how the world works, but is less than respectable now in the 21st century. 

You know, you spend an awful lot of time making bogus arguments like... "why would dead rocks need to evolve"?  and "cells are so complex!", but you never seem to offer any proof of your theory.  The question of "why dead rocks NEED to evolve" is as unintelligible as to why does the grass NEED to be green.  The fact that cells are complex does not mean it could ONLY be created from a supernatural force.  The crux of your entire argument is that the other side is too hard to understand, so you aren't even going to try.  And then you shove your God theory in without any evidence at all.  Yet you don't even see the foolishness in that.  ANYBODY in ANY religion could make your argument and then insert their deity into the gap. 

4. The moral argument, and value of life.

Morality comes from evolution, culture and experiences.  Simple as that.  This argument has been done to death on this site.  Look around.  The idea that morality comes from God is assanine.  I'm not going to argue it again.  You'd lose.  Look around and see. 

If God doesn't exist, then how could you rationally explain all that?

You asked like 10 questions.  Every single answer is the same.  Evolution, culture and experience explains it far better than "God".  Better in every way. 

5. Without God, life has no reason to be, there is no ultimate goal

And with God, you are nothing but a cosmic cheerleader.  Congrats!  Unfortunately for you, this is not an evidence based argument for God.  It's just that you don't like the implications.  Though, the truth is, there are plenty of reasons to live.  While there is no ultimate goal, you are able to create whichever goals you wish for yourself and pursue them in the time you have.   

6. Religious experiences and miracles

Do you not read anything other people are saying to you here?  You just keep parroting this crap as if it has value.  Look, I already told you, if you are going to count "religious experiences" as proof that it's true, then you MUST count the experiences of other people's religions as evidence of THEIR gods too.  Unless you would like to say that YOURS is somehow special and you couldn't possibly be wrong about your experience... but all those other people are just fools.  In which case, you're just being stubbornly idiotic.  Where does that go wrong?  Where is the problem with this? 

It must be the act of a supernatural being".  We know how all of those work now.  And we know more about the universe than we ever have in the history of civilization.  And we continue to learn more.  What that has done is pushed any notion of the necessity of God as an explanatory force into oblivion.

How so ?

Because they all have explanations that no longer require a diety!  What are you not getting here?  Lightning and thunder has to do with air and friction.  Volcanoes = cracks in the earths crust.  Disease = microscopic organisms.  This is what I am talking about.  The more you learn about how the world REALLY works, the less and less you need to postulate a diety to understand it all.  And now we don't need it at all. 

The very only fact that the universe most probably had a beginning, makes it reasonable to ask : What caused it into being ?

Jesus fucking Christ.  Am I really typing for nothing here?  Are you not reading or something?  Nobody, nobody, nobody is saying it's unreasonable to ask that question.  Do you see this?  NOBODY.  NOBODY.  The part YOU are not getting is that your assertion that God did it is only that... an assertion.  And without evidence, it deserves just as much attention as the idea that a giant shit monster created it all. 

God is the EASIEST possibility, but it is certainly NOT the one that makes the most sense.

Which one does ?

Anything natural that does not require the interference of an unknown, non-evidence based, undetectable, superpowerful, supernatural causative agent is an explanation which makes more sense than yours.  Why do I say that?  Because of what we see in our universe and how naturally occurring it all is.   

Where these universes eternal, or had they also a beginning ? If they had a beginning, you shifted the question about the cause backwards. If you assert two universes which were there before eternally, you are getting in serious philosophical problems. Beside this, if time were created at the Big BAng, no physical event could have happened before, since there was no before.

I could answer any of these questions.  Really I could.  Very easily.  But it would be all make believe.  Just like your God theory.  You can answer anything with that too, but it's all make believe.  The truth is that nobody knows how our universe came to be, but while you seem to think that is some sort of weakness for us, your hubris is staggeringly foolish. 

Now, I know that your "Magic sky man snapped his fingers and everything appeared" is an EASIER hypothesis

no, its definitively a more rational hypothesis.

It is equally as rational as Zeus, Thor, Odin or any other god in all the pantheons of the world.  In the absence of evidence, you are just putting in what you want.  That's not rational. It's lazy. 

1. there were no events before the big bang, because there was no time.

If you prefer, I will use the phrase that you, yourself used earlier.  The 2 universes that collided together existed beyond this universe.  Does that make any more sense?  After all, you used that earlier as if it made sense to you. 

Prove for me that other universes do not exist.  That would nullify any possibility that my idea is possible. 

2. do you imagine the odds of finely tune the constants to have the right expansion rate of the big bang, and the atomic forces, and magnetic forces ? what do you suggest to explain such a incredible fine tuning. Chance ?

Those are the properties of the universe.  I do not presume to know where or how they came about.  Their presence says nothing about how they got there.  Again, yours is the assertion of the lazy, impatient person who doesn't want to wait for real evidence, and would rather just put out what they think it might be.  We're back to the God of the gaps again.  "Science doesn't understand how X happened, so it must be what I think it is."

Why don't you go around arguing that lightning has nothing to do with weather patterns and that it only comes from God?  Or why don't you walk around talking about how you think diseases come from God?  Do you tell people not to bother with all those crazy weather reports because the weather all comes from God and it has nothing to do with those silly cloud things?  No, I doubt you do any of that.  Why?  Because the science behind them obviously shows that there doesn't have to be a god in order to understand, predictably, how they work.  When you have more understanding of our world in THOSE terms, then God is no longer useful. 

because it correlates with scientific findings. While others, don't.

HAH! I could create one right now that would massacre your God theory in terms of scientific findings.  Try again. 

We all know Harry Potter is fictional.

As is the bible. 

so explain then please, how the incredible fine tuning of the universe can be explained rationally ?

/sigh. I already did.  Twice now.  But if you want more, go here.  Head down to the counter-apologetics and see how fast the fine tuning argument is smashed to bits.  I am not going to annoy everyone here by making this post any longer as you did.  You make posts like that as if the sheer volume of your posts make them more valid.  It just makes arguing with you more time consuming.  You should stick to smaller numbers of subjects. 

http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Fine-tuning_argument

I'm getting too fucking old to type out these long responses.  It used to be easy, but now it's just rehashing the same crap on a different day and it's just annoying.  Note to theists... pick a small topic and stay on it.  What you don't get is that while you're side only has to assert something and not provide any real evidence, our side has to provide lots of evidence to back up what we say.  And that takes time.  It takes no time to ask stupid questions like "How can you explain the fine tuning!?"  But it takes a LONG time sometimes to answer them.  And that's because the real answers are tougher to get. 

[jaimehlers]

jtp56:

1.

Did I not say that the Big Bang was a beginning?  Oh, wait, there it is:

The Big Bang was a beginning

As far as dark matter is concerned, the reason we can't easily observe it like we can a star is because it doesn't emit or scatter radiation.  But it can be detected through gravitational effects.  So your contention that it's "kinda like God" because it hasn't been observed or proven is not meaningful, because it can be inferred to exist through its effects, which can be observed, measured, and verified.

Also, you have an odd definition of so-called "historical science", in that you claim it is circumstantial evidence and eyewitness accounts.  Except that eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable and only go back so far in any case.  And it is more than a little ridiculous to attempt to conflate fossils and the Gospels like you did.  Furthermore, the actual terms scientists use are nomothetic and historical, and scientists of every discipline use both, as both disciplines are equally verifiable using empirical evidence.  Your claim notwithstanding, it makes no sense to imply that historical science can seriously use a non-scientific document like the Bible.

2.

You seriously want to claim that creation started with perfection?  Not even the Bible tries to assert that.  And your assertion that creation follows the 2nd Law while evolution does not betrays what I can only describe as a fundamental misunderstanding of how the 2nd Law works.  What the 2nd Law actually says is that a system will not spontaneously move from a state of high entropy to a state of low entropy without an infusion of energy from outside the system; it does not say that lowering entropy is impossible.

And as for the Biblical record, the fact that catastrophes can happen doesn't prove that there was a global worldwide flood like you assert, let alone after humans came into existence.  Plus, you hold up what you call evidence, then tell me that I need to go look it up for myself.  As much as I got on Godexists for using other people's quotes by themselves, he did at least quote the information he was using, rather than throwing out tidbits and expecting them to go hunt down what he was talking about.

3.

Alright, so you've 'debunked' abiogenesis.  Care to provide links to it so I can actually examine your reasoning instead of just taking your word for it?  The Bible is not a scientific theory[1] by the way.

4.

Amazing that you can tell where I got my morality from by reading a few of my posts here.  Or maybe you're just blowing smoke.  I have my suspicions as to which, based on the general thread of your post.  In other words, prove it.

In any case, I never said that Christianity didn't affect the development of morality.  What I said was that morality evolved from a very simple beginning.  Godexists's argument is essentially that there is no morality without God to provide it, and I was countering his assertion.  Also, the theory of evolution doesn't talk about strength at all, it talks about fitness to survive.  Those most suited to survive in an environment most likely will; physical strength has nothing to do with it.

5.

I didn't say morality came from genes.  I said it exists within us and grows as we do.  You obviously took that to mean that morality was genetic, which is ridiculous.  I was countering the assertion that morality came from some absolute wellspring outside of us.  Sure, it's learned.  Most people won't develop morality on their own without any outside input (which reinforces my point about it not being from an external absolute source).  But once they have morality, it exists within them and grows with them.

And we don't know what morals might be in the animal kingdom or not, since we can't communicate meaningfully with animals.  But there's  evidence that animals do have morals, which allow them to cooperate for the good of the group (the same as humans).  For example, lionesses will bring their kills back to the rest of the pride so that all of them - including the cubs, many of which are not hers - can eat.  Wolves will cooperate with the rest of their pack to take down difficult prey so that they all can eat.  That's what morality fundamentally is - putting the tribe (or whatever the grouping is called) first so that everyone has a better chance of surviving and thriving.

6.

Um, okay?  My point was that I made a promise to myself and kept it.  If people are incapable of holding to their morality, that should have been impossible for me to do.

1.	or a book about scientific theories

[Astreja]

there are enough testimonies of people which had out of the body experiences, that proves our soul and spirit can exist without our body.

It proves no such thing, because those people were not actually permanently dead.  All it indicates is that there's an interesting brain phenomenon that occurs in conjunction with near-death states.

[Astreja]

Without God, life has no reason to be, there is no ultimate goal

With eternal life there is no ultimate goal, either. If there is no end to the timeline, it's mathematically impossible to get to "the ultimate goal."

Meaning is created by our own deliberate actions and choices, not handed to us by an external agent.

The best explaination is God, because if God created the world then it wouldn't be hard to believe that he can intervene supernaturally in this world.

The very same thing can be said of Allfather Oðinn (*wave wave wave* Hi, Dad!) who. according to Old Norse scriptures, had a hand in creating the world.  Why should I believe your mythology over that of My own family?

[Astreja]

Not interested in spending eternity with a god that's too weak to deal with My imperfection.

He dealt with it, and resolved your, my, our problem. But its upon us to accept his offer of forgiveness, and eternal life.

That's an incredibly piss-poor way of dealing with this alleged problem.  I reject the offer.  I cannot respect a god that has to fucking kill something to paint some illusory "sinlessness" over its own creation so it doesn't feel compelled to toss sentient beings into Hell and leave them there till the end of time.

I don't think there's anyone out there to forgive them, and I don't think "forever life" is possible.

how can you be so sure about this ?

I don't need to be "sure."  I'm quite content to look at the myriad world mythologies and their conflicting versions of life after death, and the total lack of any credible evidence for such a thing. 

God's will is that all human kind might be saved, and should not go to hell.

Then your god shouldn't have f%cking created a hell!  If it did create one, its will that all humankind be saved is a very weak will indeed.

I believe the only way to be saved is the one proposed in the bible.

I believe that salvation is wholly mythical, and that it doesn't actually matter which version you choose because all of them will ultimately fail.

If hell exists, your god is 100% responsible for all the suffering there.

No, he is not. He presented the escape, so that nobody needs to end up there. But he will not obligate anyone to be saved. Its your choice , you need to convert yourself, and accept Gods offer of forgiveness.

GE, I have taken a vow to never, under any circumstances, accept that offer.  It disgusts Me to think that anyone would debase their humanity by saying the Sinner's Prayer, which I consider the real "Mark of the Beast."

If it actually exists (but I rather doubt that it does), I choose to go voluntarily to this alleged hell to minister to the other victims of Biblegod.  The only way for your god to save Me is to abolish hell.

And I reiterate:  If your god created the place, it is 100% responsible for the suffering.  Your god is like a poisoner that only gives the antidote to people who say "Pretty please."  Good people don't do crap like that, and it appalls Me that you're making excuses for some mythical being that bloody well should know the difference between good and evil.

[Anfauglir]

there are enough testimonies of people which had out of the body experiences, that proves our soul and spirit can exist without our body.

Right.  And there are enough testimonies of alien abductions to prove that they are really happening.

Or are you confusing testimony with evidence?

[ungod]

5. Without God, life has no reason to be, there is no ultimate goal

Kindly enlighten us as to what is the "ultimate goal" of eternal life?

 

[ungod]

2. The universe is finely tuned to permit life on our planet.

So here we are, living a precarious existence on a thin crust over a ball of molten rock, helpless in the face of earthquakes as the crust shifts around, floods, climate change, monsoons, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, locust swarms, plagues, asteroid impacts,......yes, indeed - sure sounds "fine tuned"!
 

[ungod]

A small part of the evolutionists' problem is that hard objects are never observed spontaneously to transform themselves (on their own recognizance) into abstract ideas.

A large part of the Christians problem is that wafers and wine have never been observed to be miraculously transformed into flesh and blood.

 

[ungod]

This is supported through scientific, and philosophical reasons. Therefore it had a cause. Since beyond our universe, there was no time, no space, and no matter

Would you mind supporting your unsupported claim of what does or does not exist beyond our universe? Scientific evidence only, please.

 

[ungod]

3) Everyone is psychologically unsatisfied. People feel an emptiness in themselves that they want to fill.

And good Christians like Benny Hinn, Pat Robbert$on, Jimmy Swaggart are ready to fill that void, and empty the suckers wallets.

 

[ungod]

A small part of the evolutionists' problem is that hard objects are never observed spontaneously to transform themselves (on their own recognizance) into abstract ideas.

Pretty clueless about evolution, aren't you....

[Godexists]

The answer to 2 is easy... We exist so the probability for life to form when there are billions of stars along with billions of other galaxies to take into consideration

http://www.reasons.org/physics/constants-physics/exotic-life-sites-feasibility-far-out-habitats

The data demonstrate that the probability of finding even one planet with the capacity to support life falls short of one chance in 10^140 (that number is 1 followed by 140 zeros).

http://www.reasons.org/philosophyreligion/worldviews/anthropic-principle-precise-plan-humanity

In the 1960s the odds that any given planet in the universe would possess the necessary conditions to support intelligent physical life were shown to be less than one in ten thousand.5 In 2001 those odds shrank to less than one in a number so large it might as well be infinity (10^173).6

along with the probability that there could be an infinite number of universes.

Multiverses are a frequently mentioned alternative. Its a bad one.

http://www.scienceandreligiontoday.com/2010/05/13/does-a-fine-tuned-universe-lead-to-god/

In the case of the fine-tuning, we already know that minds often produce fine-tuned devices, such as Swiss watches. Postulating God--a supermind--as the explanation of the fine-tuning, therefore, is a natural extrapolation from of what we already observe minds to do. In contrast, it is difficult to see how the atheistic many-universes hypothesis could be considered a natural extrapolation from what we observe. Moreover, unlike the atheistic many-universes hypothesis, we have some experiential evidence for the existence of God, namely religious experience. Thus, by the above principle, we should prefer the theistic explanation of the fine-tuning over the atheistic many-universes explanation, everything else being equal.

http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/resources/Faraday%20Papers/Faraday%20Paper%2010%20Holder_EN.pdf

How are these extraordinary numbers to be explained? The most popular explanation and the one that appeals to Dawkins, is the ‘multiverse’. The idea here is that, unbeknown to us, there are other universes, all slightly different, so that it becomes more likely that in that number, a universe like ours might exist. Davies wrote, “The multiverse theory seeks to replace the appearance of design by the hand of chance.”[9] I have read some accounts that leave one to believe that a relatively small number of other universes would significantly alter the probabilities. That however is clearly not the case.

How many universes then would you need to make it at all probable that one of them could be like our universe? String theorists posit a number of 10 to the power of 500. It might help to see that number written out. It is 1 with 500 zeroes after it.

'Multiverse' Theory Fails to Explain Away God

There is no evidence for the existence of alternate universes, and if a concept cannot be proved or disproved, it is not open to scientific investigation. Stanford University visionary physicist Andrei Linde seemed adamant, however, that though this theory is not scientific, it must be true because it is logically necessary. When asked whether physicists will ever be able to prove the multiverse in the absence of any hope for physical confirmation, he told Discover, “Nothing else fits the data.”

What data? Even tiny variations in planetary distances, any more or less gravity, or any other difference in the current structure of the universe would make it hostile to life. The one model that explains this data without inventing fictional, unprovable multiverses is the creation model, which presents the planned, purposeful origin of space, time, matter, and life by a Creator. The only “data” that would seem to require multiverses is the absence of God—but this is not data, it is “science falsely so called,”2 empty imaginings devoid of evidentiary support.

 

This to me says the opposite of 'grand design' but rather 'grand number of chances to happen'.

one of 10^500 isnt really a grand number of chances to happen......

Also, conversly to what you beleive, physics can take us back to the beginning of the big bang without the need for god.

The question is what comes beyond it.


 

Doesn't this notion alone bother you!?  That since natual laws of nature can take us all the way back to what we know today as the BBT, what room doesn that leave for a god?

the most crucial question is who or what put it all in place.

  It doesn't, you insert the god notion because of your emotional attachment in 5....

AND because God makes most sense to me.

5 sounds like to me like you need the emotional satisfaction of wanting there to be a god for life to have a purpose.

Well, withoud God, life does not have a purpose at all. One day, we will be all dead, and if God does not exist, what difference does it make, if we lived a morally high standard life, or if we were a jerk ?

I hear this all too often from theists and is primitive humans emotional response to the age old 'why are we here' question.  If you can learn to separate appeal to emotion to rational thought and obvious natural process with power in numbers working for it to happen, you might understand how science works and then know why supernatural is never and will never be the answer to natural occurances; including cause/effect of the big bang.

So you believe something " natural " caused the Big Bang ? How could it be something natural, if there were nothing physical beyond the Big Bang ?

[Hatter23]

Because there is no credible evidence that any aspect of our self-awareness or personality survives physical death.

It depends what you cound as solid evidence.....you can even say that there is no evidence YOU exist. You might be just a illusion, a phantom......


 

At the instant that the human brain shuts down, our thoughts and our sense of self automatically terminate.

Where is the evidence it is so ? In my view, that is a baseless claim.

Please stop with the throwing mud into the water and appealing to ignorance. It doesn't fool anyone here. Falsifiable claim, double blind test, peer reviewed article....the only way to determine what is real.

[ungod]

Well, withoud God, life does not have a purpose at all. One day, we will be all dead, and if God does not exist, what difference does it make, if we lived a morally high standard life, or if we were a jerk ?

Obviously none, if we look at the example and lifestyle of many of God's "preachers". Especially hilarious are the Christian homohating preachers who get caught with their pants down! 

[Hatter23]

The answer to 2 is easy... We exist so the probability for life to form when there are billions of stars along with billions of other galaxies to take into consideration

http://www.reasons.org/physics/constants-physics/exotic-life-sites-feasibility-far-out-habitats

I just read that, and there is loads and load of probability and science quotes...none of which adress the essence of the anthromorphic problem.

Then this gem hit me:


Science points to the existence of a transcendent (beyond space and time), personal Creator, demonstrably the same Creator revealed in the pages of Scripture.



So...I didn't need to read further. These are lies. There is NOTHING in science that does ANY of these things.

[velkyn]

Well, withoud God, life does not have a purpose at all. One day, we will be all dead, and if God does not exist, what difference does it make, if we lived a morally high standard life, or if we were a jerk ?

  Humans give life purpose and we don’t need any god, yours or any others, to give it.  It’s rather pathetic that it seems that the only thing keeping you from being an asshole is belief in a bogeyman.  How childish. 

and more willful ignorance about the BBT.  Sad.