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religion

Which are counter-argued with, from an objective view-point, superior arguments.
And it really doesn't work like that. The Catholic church just deems every modern technological advancement as somehow being unethical, especially in taboo areas.
I'm going to dig up a few articles for you later to read about how humans come to moral decisions, then you'll see that Christians would agree with abortion if it weren't for what the Pope said.
And you can't just blurt out abortion being murder :/. Embryos/fetuses are just a lump of matter prior to conception. They're not even conscious in the womb. They can't feel any pain etc. I mean, if we're going to say abortion is murder because it's ending a potential human life, then so's masturbating, you're killing 1000s of potential human lives. So's not raping the nearest woman near you. Etc. I mean. Seriously. There's so many things which you're not doing which are ending thousands of potential human lives.
That's all a fetus is. A potential human life. Just in a less primitive state.
We draw the line at birth(edited from conception[got confused]). Then it's considered human. Whether that's right or not, we'll never know, but going back to moral subjectivity, it's not like it can be deemed right or wrong. In the end of the day these are all just different opinions. It's just a matter of who can justify theirs better.
EMZ.
 
I don't believe in the Catholic belief. I do however believe in a higher being that many religions refer to as their God.
I gtg, I'll get back to this tomorrow.
 
If you're going to try and debate with me please acknowledge all my post rather than just focussing on small parts.
It's all based on the subject ultimately, and defining how well they justify their opinions is a ludicrous thing to ask me to do. It's justified when it disproves most of the foundations of the opposing opinion, imo.
EMZ.
 
Most of your post was so clearly fallacious reasoning that I didn't bother! I'm not a Catholic. The difference between deliberately aborting a baby & the other things is so vast it beggars belief you could try to equate them. That's proof that you aren't objective! Which nobody is. I missed where you prove moral subjectivity? You can hardly mean there's no right & wrong? Or that ruins your insistence on your approach as being right!
 
You know, all you're doing is throwing personal insults. You're not actually backing up anything you say.
And yeah. I do mean there's no right and wrong. And IDK how you can't believe in moral subjectivity :/.
What exactly defines moral objectivity then? The bible? That contradicts all over. The law? Clearly not since it's constantly changing.
There is no right and wrong.
IMO, my opinion is more justified because the justifications are stronger than yours.
How does one determine the strength? I can't really be bothered defining, but basically, if it disproves it, or discredits it to a significant extent.
I don't want to go into a flame war. If this is where it's going I think I'm not going to post back because I don't handle personal criticism well.
EMZ=]
 
I'm still waiting for someone to present me a reasonable argument or some kind of proof for the existence of God. I've always made an effort to understand different theologies and religions, I find different belief systems very interesting. But until someone can come up with something convincing... I will remain an atheist. Meaning that I have no belief in God, rather than believing in the non-existence of God.

As for the above arguments... "God of the Gaps" has been rolled out as usual. The fact that science can not yet explain everything does not prove the existence of God. The fact that we understand the universe as well as we do is a pretty good effort for a bunch of creatures who have not evolved all that far from monkeys. And the abortion argument has nothing to do with whether or not God exists. I'm not a woman, so I don't even need an opinion on the subject.

I'm not trying to turn anyone away from a belief in a higher being. I don't go knocking on people's doors on the weekend trying to convert them to atheism. I understand that some people feel a personal connection with God, or have some kind of personal experience that makes God's existence apparent to them. This is fine for them, but it does nothing to convince me.
 
You've asked for evidence & reasoning, while discounting the best of the former & ruling out most of the latter! I don't go around knocking on people's doors, either. I've talked to people about my beliefs but not to those who said they didn't want to.
 
BruceCM said:
You've asked for evidence & reasoning, while discounting the best of the former & ruling out most of the latter! I don't go around knocking on people's doors, either. I've talked to people about my beliefs but not to those who said they didn't want to.
Click to expand...
No problems, tell me what evidence and reasoning I have discounted and why it was not valid for me to discount it. I'm happy to discuss the subject, but I find your reply a little vague. What I can do when I have time and I'm not sitting in a dodgy internet cafe in Thailand, is that I can put each of my thoughts that I expressed above into a separate thread in the "serious" forum, then you can set me straight. :)
 
The universe is evidence. Most arguments for God's existence can be called 'God of the gaps'. Thing there is, that IF everything CAN be explained properly without God, then I'll stop believing in Him. Sorry if you're into science but there's plenty of things which that can't, EVER, explain. Really, for instance, scientific methods can't be used for the beginning of the universe. Or, if you ask WHY, that's more philosophical than scientific. Why is there gravity? Because masses attract? That's what gravity is/does, so don't say why. At least, my science teachers told me that was a philosophical question!
 
BruceCM said:
The universe is evidence. Most arguments for God's existence can be called 'God of the gaps'. Thing there is, that IF everything CAN be explained properly without God, then I'll stop believing in Him. Sorry if you're into science but there's plenty of things which that can't, EVER, explain. Really, for instance, scientific methods can't be used for the beginning of the universe. Or, if you ask WHY, that's more philosophical than scientific. Why is there gravity? Because masses attract? That's what gravity is/does, so don't say why. At least, my science teachers told me that was a philosophical question!
Click to expand...
Excellent. Let's keep it objective.

Yes, most arguments for the existence of God can be called "God of the Gaps". It is fine if you choose to use that as your basis for belief in God. My point is simply that the absence of a scientific explanation and/or proof for something does not prove the existence of God.

Let me preface the next paragraph by saying that your science teachers were dullards. Which is probably why they were science teachers and not scientists. You asked a perfectly valid question and they fobbed you off because they lacked the intelligence to even realize that it was a valid question. Same as when I asked how time could be infinite since that would mean that an infinite amount of time preceded any event.

For example, if you use the fact that we don't exactly know why and how masses attract, simply that they do, as a basis for believing in God, will you therefore stop believing in God if science proves the existence of the graviton and can describe its function? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton Most likely not I guess. Science has a lot less gaps than it did a few centuries ago, or even a few decades ago. Although every gap that we close usually opens a few more. Science as we know it is far from perfect because it has been put together by us - and, if you believe in evolution (or even if you don't) we are not very far at all removed from chimpanzees (between 1% and 5% difference in our DNA depending on which method you use).

I also believe that many scientists have their heads up their butts, it is only a precious few who ever manage to move our understanding forward. I find science interesting but I am not using the wonders of science as understood by humans as my basis for not believing in God. But a flaw or a gap in one set of beliefs does not necessarily prove another belief.
 
No. It's a philosophical area, though. There, you can't 'prove' anything, one way or the other. So, why is there a graviton? My science teachers did go through what science did cover, too. I'm not against science, by any means. Just saying that it is, & always will be, limited.
 
BruceCM said:
So, why is there a graviton?
Click to expand...
Why is there a graviton, why is there a universe? Where did it come from?

For that matter, if there is a God, why is there a God and where did He come from?

I don't claim to have all of the answers, and neither does the field of science. Most religion does, to a certain extent, claim to the answers to the big questions at least. That doesn't make it any more correct or logical than science.

I don't think that we choose our beliefs. Our beliefs choose us. I can't help being a skeptic, it is just the way that I am wired.
 
For me my beliefs about god were part of a process,thru my life I experimented with several belief systems

and after careful consideration I came to the conclusion that god was a myth,the religion of today is

the mythology of the future.
 
My take:

I don't mean to offend (though I probably will :( ), but the idea of having a God(s) and other 'holy'/whatever characters is just stupid. People are willing to devote their lives to making sure they go to a so-called 'heaven' afterwards. I have to say, I like the theory. Be rewarded with everything infinitely, after you lead a 'good' life. Sounds great, but come on... Zero proof. Also, what if you chose the wrong religion? They can't all possibly be on the path to 'righteousness', can they? What can make a 'follower' (my way of defining someone religious to any specific religion) devote their lives to one religion with no proof of anything... over another religion with no proof of anything. If anything, the 6 (6, right?) main religions could well have been the Harry Potter novel's of a few thousand years ago.

As you probably guessed, I'm very much a science orientated person. Science is based on logic and solid facts that can be proven. That's just how it is. When you go out and start your car, god isn't igniting the cylinders for you, A spark is - thats the rough concept, anyway. :p

As for other scientific issues people have a problem with, such as evolution and how we all came to be type things. They're all theories. Unless they can be proven with solid evidence and by applying logic, they're just theories based on what we do know to be fact.

I often think about the various theories behind the universe's 'beginning' - obviously the most profound is the big bang theory. If we go by that, when the big bang occured there must have been a lot... well. A colossal amount of heat. So surely if you can find all the elements that might or were present at the time and generate that level of heat (probably not even possible on our earth) - wouldn't that prove or disprove the big bang theory?

Strayed a bit off topic, but meh.
 
Chris said:
...when the big bang occured there must have been a lot... well. A colossal amount of heat. So surely if you can find all the elements that might or were present at the time and generate that level of heat (probably not even possible on our earth) - wouldn't that prove or disprove the big bang theory?
Click to expand...

By elements I first thought you meant hydrogen, helium, lithium etc. Of which, of course, there were none for quite some time after the big bang. It was a chaos of subatomic particles, and the first "element" (hydrogen) did not form for 379,000 years. The larger elements had to wait for the formation of stars and for the nuclear fusion reactions within them to kick off, and anything heavier than iron had to wait for the biggest stars to explode (supernovae).

As for the subatomic particles and energy that actually made up the first instants of the big bang, we don't even know what all of the subatomic particles are now and we know little about the nature of some of the ones we do know about. And some are still just theory (like the Higgs boson), yet to be detected. That is why governments spend billions of dollars on enormous particle accelerators which can wind the speed of subatomic particles up to very high speeds and smash them apart. Once the particle accelerator in Switzerland gets wound up to full speed there should be some interesting results.

The big bang theory only covers what happens in the first instants after the big bang, it does not attempt to explain what caused the big bang. To my mind the big bang theory is about as much a theory as the theory of evolution - there is so much data to back it up that it is unlikely to be disproven or displaced by another theory. There is still a heap of background radiation buzzing around the universe, left over from the big bang, that can still be detected today. And the further away we look with the most powerful telescopes the further back in time we can look, and the closer (in time) we can look to the actual big bang. We can use various telescopes to see what the galaxies and stars looked like billions of years in the past and see how that conforms to the big bang theory. Hey, gravity is just a theory, we don't know exactly what causes it, but we all know what happens when you jump off a building.

As for what caused the big bang in the first place... think about a vacuum. You would think that a total vacuum would be a very quiet place, but in fact it is full of subatomic particles popping into and out of existence. What triggers a subatomic particle to appear from nothing? Is God sitting there making every one of those events happen through his omnipotence? Apparently not! If it can happen on a subatomic level, then the big bang is simply a matter of scaling the idea up. But really any sort of speculation on the cause of the big bang is purely conjecture at this stage.
 
I used the term 'elements' loosely, you obviously know more on the matter than me, so I don't have much to say in terms of a response. :lol: :p
 
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