But seriously . . . atheism?

[Kat Kanning]

Back to the original post....I saw this quote today:

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

- Thomas Jefferson

[Braddogg]

Di . . . did you read my response to you, Kat?

[Raineyrocks]

Kind of puts the "Decider" in perspective... He ain't even the wart on the ass of our planet.

Yeah but try getting him to believe that!

[Michael Fisher]

I have no idea what all the tohubohu and hullabaloo is about.

Believing in God has nothing to do with evidence, only faith.

If evidence proved God's existence, then faith would be unnecessary. Why would He ever desire to nullify the necessity of faith before the apocalypse (the revealing)?

Credere est videre. Believing is seeing.

Is the question of God's existence the only place where you use blind faith as a basis for decision making?

Skepticism is a necessary component of faith. Without skepticism, faith is blind; through it, faith leads to the truth. This is indirectly confirmed in the Bible.

If, after believing, one does not see, then believing would not be seeing, and belief would then cease for the reasonable skeptic. Yet, with a heart and mind even temporarily open to the possibility of accepting God's love and forgiveness, one may believe, and then one will see.

Unfortunately, most people refuse to do this. "Unless you people see signs and wonders, you simply will not believe" (John 4:48 NASB). "For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them" (Matthew 13:15).

This is normally a point of agreement between myself and atheists. I am not a blind, Bible-thumping fool, but a truth-seeking ultra-skeptic. I was an atheist for my entire life, and they rightfully mock all attempts to point at evidence of God's existence not based on faith. Why would God supply hard evidence, and thus nullify faith, but to appease those who refuse to look in His direction to see if He is real?

Wisdom is defined as one's ability to perform an unbiased search for the truth, regardless of one's emotions, personal history, or surroundings. All else is foolishness. If one refuses even to seek the truth, for whatever excuse, then one's lack of wisdom becomes blatantly obvious.

Completely empty yourself, seek the unbiased truth, and you will find it.

[Michael Fisher]

I've found several different ways of literally experiencing God as an atheist. Each one works on its own, without the others:

1. Completely forgive a most egregious transgression. Especially if the physical or emotional pain are impossible to forgive, God will shine His love upon you like nothing you've ever felt before. It is unmistakable.

or

2. Fast and pray. This works if the heart is open to finding the truth, regardless of prior judgements or feelings. Prayers must be made in sincere love and can be for family, friends, enemies, or anyone else. You can literally feel His love emanating from within yourself, and you wonder where the love is coming from.

or

3. Give your entire heart to God and permanently align yourself with Him. ABC: Admit your need for God's forgiveness and guidance, Believe in Him and His forgiveness, and Confess Him before others.

These are God?  Why must they be God?  For example, fasting weakens the body and praying is so much like meditating that the result might be tapping into the subconcious rather than tapping into an infinite divine benevolent omnipotent being. 

Let me know when you've tried one of these methods, and we can discuss your experiences. Until then, you are only theorizing about the contents of three envelopes instead of simply opening them. (Though I understand that each action listed is very difficult to the busy modern man.)

Please remember to open these envelopes in unbiased wisdom.

[Braddogg]

Skepticism is a necessary component of faith. Without skepticism, faith is blind; through it, faith leads to the truth. This is indirectly confirmed in the Bible.

If, after believing, one does not see, then believing would not be seeing, and belief would then cease for the reasonable skeptic. Yet, with a heart and mind even temporarily open to the possibility of accepting God's love and forgiveness, one may believe, and then one will see.

Unfortunately, most people refuse to do this. "Unless you people see signs and wonders, you simply will not believe" (John 4:48 NASB). "For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them" (Matthew 13:15).

This is normally a point of agreement between myself and atheists. I am not a blind, Bible-thumping fool, but a truth-seeking ultra-skeptic. I was an atheist for my entire life, and they rightfully mock all attempts to point at evidence of God's existence not based on faith. Why would God supply hard evidence, and thus nullify faith, but to appease those who refuse to look in His direction to see if He is real?

Wisdom is defined as one's ability to perform an unbiased search for the truth, regardless of one's emotions, personal history, or surroundings. All else is foolishness. If one refuses even to seek the truth, for whatever excuse, then one's lack of wisdom becomes blatantly obvious.

Completely empty yourself, seek the unbiased truth, and you will find it.

You and I must have different definitions of skepticism . . . .  I'm having a hard time weedwhacking through all the trite mysticism, but I think I got your point.  You say you are skeptical, but that evidence for God does not exist.  How, again, is this not a blind faith?  Indeed, how is ANY faith, that is, a supposition not based on physical evidence, not blind?  I'll rephrase my question: Is this the kind of "skepticism" you apply to other aspects of your life?  Is this the kind of "skepticism" you'd use to test an assertion like "Your best friend killed your father" or "Eating coffee grounds cures cancer"?  Or is God the only place where your "skepticism" is satisfied without the presence of physical evidence?

[Michael Fisher]

I'm having a hard time weedwhacking through all the trite mysticism...

Have I been disrespectful of you? Or do you talk to all of your friends in this manner?

You say you are skeptical, but that evidence for God does not exist.  How, again, is this not a blind faith?

Only faith in God without skepticism is blind. If you honestly give Him your entire heart and all your trust, for any amount of time, and He does not comfort you, then He does not exist. But He does, and He will. That has been His promise for thousands of years.

Or is God the only place where your "skepticism" is satisfied without the presence of physical evidence?

Yes. God is the only one who deserves faith. Almost everything else receives some level of trust, at most. My inherent skepticism was only satisfied with the vast evidence of God which only came after truly placing my faith in Him.

Ask anyone here how much my attitude has changed since finding God last year and how it has stayed the same. I have always been ultra-skeptical, even to a fault, and I still am. But my walk in the past year has changed me beyond recognition.

[David]

You are not the only Deist here Rocketman. 
What convinced me that there is a God, wasn't the bible, at least not after I started to question its accuracy, was DNA, and the cellular complexities. 
For example, in a highly simplified cell, of a bacteria, there are roughly 15000 parts.  DNA, RNA, mitocondria, cell wall, waste removal, nutriant processing, the parts designed to procreate, ect.  If a single part is missing, the cell dies.  No mitocondria, the cell cannot convert or use energy from food.  No waste removal, and the cell literally poisons itself to death. 
For the cell to be the process of evolution, it must have ALL of those functions, or it will have a very short life, if it can 'live' at all. 
Furthermore, what turns it all on?  A newly died cell has all the coponents of life, but isn't alive.  What turns the whole 15000 part mechinism on?  Keep in mind, this is a highly simple cell, almost all single celled organisms are much more complex. 
Protein is essential to life.  That is true of simple cells as well.  All proteins can be created in a lab, and in nature.  The problem, is that when proteins are naturally created by nature, fully half of them are poisoness to life.  That would have been true in the primordial 'soup' of life as well. 
The eye, seems pretty simple right?  Light sensitive creatures eventually evolved into seeing creatures.  The problem is the eye is one of the most complex organs in the human body.  It is also the fastest(I think). 
In theory the fossil record should have a constant stream of partially changing (mutating) creatures.  It should comprize a bulk of the fossil record.  It doesn't.  What is found are fully formed body parts. 
They can't prove who God is, but they can prove that an initial creator is neccessary to jumpstart life, (remember, all 15000 plus pieces must work similtaneously or there is no life) and create them in the first place. 
That is why I believe in a creator. 

[eques]

You are not the only Deist here Rocketman. 
What convinced me that there is a God, wasn't the bible, at least not after I started to question its accuracy, was DNA, and the cellular complexities. 
For example, in a highly simplified cell, of a bacteria, there are roughly 15000 parts.  DNA, RNA, mitocondria, cell wall, waste removal, nutriant processing, the parts designed to procreate, ect.  If a single part is missing, the cell dies.  No mitocondria, the cell cannot convert or use energy from food.  No waste removal, and the cell literally poisons itself to death. 
For the cell to be the process of evolution, it must have ALL of those functions, or it will have a very short life, if it can 'live' at all. 

It seems like you've got some sort of argument from incredulity going on here.  Cellular life certainly is fascinating, as there are many individual parts that all work together for such a tiny (comparative to us) object to function.

The thing is, cells had a very long time (relatively speaking) to get up and running in comparison with the rest of life.  During that time, one could think of evolution as "experimenting" (keeping in mind that the anthropomorphism of evolution is solely a rhetorical device) with all kinds of ways that life might happen.  However, this process does not necessarily need to be directed, as the survivors of whatever the current generation of "life" is will be the ones to replicate into the future.

Many of the functions we see in cells (bacteria don't have mitochondria, by the way) have been solidified in place for quite a long time now.  The relative stability of the cell implies that it has stood the "test of time," for lack of a better phrase, and is basically the de facto standard for nearly all of earthly life as we know it (I figure there's something I'm missing, and I'm not sure if viruses count as being alive).

Furthermore, what turns it all on?  A newly died cell has all the coponents of life, but isn't alive.  What turns the whole 15000 part mechinism on?  Keep in mind, this is a highly simple cell, almost all single celled organisms are much more complex. 

I don't know the answer to the first part (probably best to ask a microbiologist about more detail of the inner workings of a cell).  I can speak to your comment, however.

A very recently dead cell has all of the components of life--almost.  If the cell is dead, then there is something lacking in that cell that caused it to no longer be alive.  Whether the cause is internal or external, the cell lacks something crucial to continue being alive.

Regarding cells that are much more complex than the simplest cells: the increase in complexity is merely an increase in the order of magnitude of interworking parts.

Protein is essential to life.  That is true of simple cells as well.  All proteins can be created in a lab, and in nature.  The problem, is that when proteins are naturally created by nature, fully half of them are poisoness to life.  That would have been true in the primordial 'soup' of life as well. 

I don't see this as being so much of a problem, especially since either the poisonous proteins would have been sufficiently rare and/or biological systems would have developed some sort of immunity or protection to such proteins if there were such "poisonous" proteins around.

Also, those proteins may well be poisonous to life as we know it--or, at least, to mammals (for example, "mad cow disease" is actually a protein that eats away at the brain as opposed to a virus, bacterium, or other "germ")--but it's pretty likely that if you have protein A ("good" for life as we know it) and protein B ("bad" for life as we know it) floating in the primordial soup, nothing much of consequence will happen.  Also, if the proteins exist in a certain proportion to each other (which is inevitable given limited resources as well as relative stability of various proteins), say, protein A to protein B is about a 10:1 ratio, it doesn't matter how poisonous protein B is--there's so much of A that it really won't make a dent.

I'm not really sure if this is a coherent depiction of the issue as it may be counterfactual--after all, I know *I* wasn't there.    Further discussion is best left to a paleobiologist (or whatever they're called).

The eye, seems pretty simple right?  Light sensitive creatures eventually evolved into seeing creatures.  The problem is the eye is one of the most complex organs in the human body.  It is also the fastest(I think). 

I don't know anybody who claims that the eye is a simple organism.  It has been observed for centuries (perhaps longer) that the eye is one of the most complex features of life.

The eye has evolved independently numerous times (this statement can be verified in one of Dawkins' books, I think).  There exist organisms which evolved from eyed ancestors which have lost their ability to see due to their current environment.

I'm not going to say that they've got all the most intricate details of the eye worked out, but I can look at the inner workings of the eye without having to ascribe its origin to anything other than the evolutionary process.

In theory the fossil record should have a constant stream of partially changing (mutating) creatures.  It should comprize a bulk of the fossil record.  It doesn't.  What is found are fully formed body parts. 

Not to be a pisser, but I would like to know what reputable scientist makes this claim and what his reasoning is.  I don't know of any theory of fossilization that says that there should be a constant stream of mutating creatures, nor do I really understand what this has to do with a belief in God.

As I understand fossil theory, we're actually lucky to have any fossils at all given the ordeal that an organism has to go through in order to become fossilized.  The vast majority of organisms never actually become fossilized.

They can't prove who God is, but they can prove that an initial creator is neccessary to jumpstart life, (remember, all 15000 plus pieces must work similtaneously or there is no life) and create them in the first place. 

I might be breaking up your train of thought here, but I don't understand this section.

That is why I believe in a creator. 

It may be convincing to you, but I remain unconvinced.

[Caleb]

You say you are skeptical, but that evidence for God does not exist.  How, again, is this not a blind faith?  Indeed, how is ANY faith, that is, a supposition not based on physical evidence, not blind?

I realize you were talking to Michael, but I thought I'd chime in here. 

Evidence for God exists.  There are philosophical "proofs" put forward by both sides of the debate.  Some "proofs" are more convincing than others, but all seek to derive a truth about causation by inference, which is a legitimate method of attaining truth.  It is not, to be sure, inerrant.  But it is a legitimate method. Having familiarized myself with various "proofs" (on both the theistic and atheistic side), I feel 100% certain in my conviction that no one on either side chooses his belief based on the proofs.  Rather, he selects the proofs to comfort him in his decision.

It's not that there is "no evidence for God."  It's just that experiencing him is so much more powerful and profound than a "proof" is, and so much more convincing.  To me, it's sort of like gravity.  Some people can work the math out for you to show you how gravity works.  I doubt most people would find the discussion all that stimulating.  You know that there is gravity because you experience it.

Now, before Newton came along, people weren't flying off into space.  Newton explained the math behind the common experience, but prior to Newton, people could still experience gravity.  And today, some guy born in a rainforest who has never heard about classical physics can still experience gravity.

My point is that experience is a valid method of knowledge.  In fact, all of the sciences are based upon empirical data -- data which is achieved through experience!  Experience is antecedent to knowledge.  Experience and supposition are two totally different concepts, in the same way that the child who looks out at a setting sun has a truer understanding of light than the blind physicist who attempts to suppose what light must be like.  I do not believe in unicorns.  Nonetheless, if I met one, my opinion should be changed.  Once you meet God, your opinion cannot but be changed. That may sound like trite mysticism to you, because you can't replicate my experience in your double-blind study.  But my experience doesn't need your validation. 

[TackleTheWorld]

Now you're getting warm, Caleb.
That is the most persuasive argument for theism I've heard in many years.
But there is a part missing.

Philosophical proofs are unconvincing: true
Experience is antecedent to knowledge: true

But pure experience is made of sensory data, before you get to conceptualizing and identifying it.
What was the sensory data that made your experience?  It had to be something tangible, a sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch.  At least a change in the amplitude or frequency of sensation.  Can you describe your experience, like Mike did?

[Braddogg]

You say you are skeptical, but that evidence for God does not exist.  How, again, is this not a blind faith?  Indeed, how is ANY faith, that is, a supposition not based on physical evidence, not blind?

Now, before Newton came along, people weren't flying off into space.  Newton explained the math behind the common experience, but prior to Newton, people could still experience gravity.  And today, some guy born in a rainforest who has never heard about classical physics can still experience gravity.

My point is that experience is a valid method of knowledge. 

Oh, totally agreed.  The experiences are real.  Perhaps I should explain what I mean by spiritual experience: that feeling of clarity, the unworldly confidence in a decision, the total peace one feels with the world, the fusion of you and your fellow creatures.  If you mean something else, we may have to work out that difference before we go further.  But the cause associated -- GOD -- does not necessarily follow.  People had spiritual experiences when they believed in Zeus, I'm sure.  But, let me borrow your gravity example.  Two guys experience gravity.  One says it's because of the attraction of two masses, and the other says it's because little elves loosely hold us to the ground.  The experience of being held firmly on the ground is the same for both, but that does not mean the elves exist.

I do not believe in unicorns.  Nonetheless, if I met one, my opinion should be changed.  Once you meet God, your opinion cannot but be changed. That may sound like trite mysticism to you, because you can't replicate my experience in your double-blind study.  But my experience doesn't need your validation. 

I think that where it turns into trite mysticism -- and I stand by that phrase, Mike, without meaning insult, knowing that I believed in that same trite mysticism with my whole being for around 9 years (I'm giving myself a pass on the first 12 years of my life) -- is when it becomes self-defining and a special case.  "If you experience God, then you'll understand." 

1) Those who experience God understand that He exists;
2) Atheists do not understand that God exists;
3) Atheists have not experienced God.

God is also a special case.  In your unicorn example, you would have a physical experience that, given a video camera or the presence of a second person, would be completely verifiable by someone other than yourself.  The existence of God does not have this.  And I appreciate Mike being able to acknowledge this, that there is a basic inconsistency in his skepticism, that he makes an exception for the question of God's existence.  And he admits that it is circular: Atheists will never understand until they believe in God, but (and I'm not quite sure if you've made this connection, Mike) to believe in God you must first be a theist.

[FTL_Ian]

I think that where it turns into trite mysticism -- and I stand by that phrase, Mike, without meaning insult, knowing that I believed in that same trite mysticism with my whole being for around 9 years (I'm giving myself a pass on the first 12 years of my life)

This explains why I was surprised that you were an atheist, because I could have sworn you had expressed in another thread that you were a Christian.  Has your change happened since you've been here at nhfree, or am I just confusing you with someone else?

[Braddogg]

I think that where it turns into trite mysticism -- and I stand by that phrase, Mike, without meaning insult, knowing that I believed in that same trite mysticism with my whole being for around 9 years (I'm giving myself a pass on the first 12 years of my life)

This explains why I was surprised that you were an atheist, because I could have sworn you had expressed in another thread that you were a Christian.  Has your change happened since you've been here at nhfree, or am I just confusing you with someone else?

Yeah, it's changed.  The process of discovering reality probably started about six months ago.  Nothing really kicked it off, just all the arguments atheists were making started making sense.

[FTL_Ian]

I remember when I was "coming out" a decade ago, I found this entertaining:
http://www.atheists.org/christianity/contradictions.html