To all atheists here

[Neotheone]

for those who arguing about science Vs Religions..

Science is Open Source...its open to other ideas and theories and its corrected and updated time to time by interested scientists.

I beg to differ, cutting edge science is far more secretive and closed source than any religion can be. Even if we set aside the sensitive defence research,Talk about patents, copyrights , intellectual property (even life can be patented now !! -- genetically modified bacteria exist and are patented) . it is human nature which reflects in both science and religion- and that is why both are getting more and more closed to evolution.

 

[salluks]

very nice read, go on!!

 

[zhopudey]

we're animals, we can't change that.

This I completely agree with Human intelligence and superiority is grossly overrated.

 

[viralbug]

^ I actually have a very firm opinion that Human is very dumb and stupid and inferior in comparison to other animals.

We're not animals, we are a shame to animals.

 

[Argus]

^ Not just that, we are actually worse than virii. More often than not we tend to destroy our habitat by our superselfish lifestyle.

Reverend agent Smith gave a similar sounding discourse to padawan Morpheus in The Holy Matrix.

 

[Params7]

Did not know animals fought for "causes"

lol I was just being nice

 

[Brendon]

This thread was a very interesting read. Since everyone is putting across his/her stand I will say that I very much believe in God.

Why ?

Throughout our universe we have yet to see any matter form out of nothing. How did matter come into being in the first place ? How did the whole universe begin if it is finite ?

I do not believe that life just happened by chance. Life does not exist in any of the other 8 planets in our solar system in any form. We do not see life forming out of nothing anywhere on earth so how did life suddenly form out of nothing. Out of 10 million discovered species on earth (so far) humans are the ONLY species that have the ability to reason.

We humans are finite beings. We have a beginning and an end. Everything around us is also finite. Everything around us has a beginning and an end. How did everything begin if there was nothing to start with. If there was some energy or something. How did it come into existence ?

From this alone I conclude that some infinite being created the universe and I would like to call this being God.

 

[blr_p]

Throughout our universe we have yet to see any matter form out of nothing. How did matter come into being in the first place ?

All started with hydrogen that got compressed into heavier elements within the stars who then exploded and become heavier stars who then exploded etc. COnsider that the universe is dated at about 15 billion years old so there was plenty of time for stuff to form.

You can say everything that the earth & nearby planets started off with comes from the stars.

How did the hydrogen get there in the first place is something ppl are trying to figure out. We can get very close in time to the moment of the big bang, but as to why it even happened in the first place is not known currently.

Answers were supposed to be forthcoming with the big hadron collider in Geneva but thats still under repairs and won't be up & running till Feb i think. It won't really start pushing the limits for at least a cpl more years yet till they can get it stable.

How did the whole universe begin if it is finite ?

I'm not sure if the universe is finite i understand that it is expanding. That galaxies are actually drifting away from each other with speed.

I do not believe that life just happened by chance. Life does not exist in any of the other 8 planets in our solar system in any form. We do not see life forming out of nothing anywhere on earth so how did life suddenly form out of nothing. Out of 10 million discovered species on earth (so far) humans are the ONLY species that have the ability to reason.

Perhaps but what are the chances that it could not happen amongst hundreds of billions of stars within our own galaxy let alone the other billions of galaxies with their individual billions of stars out there

The distances are so vast between these galaxies that light itself might take thousands if not millions of years to cover the distance between.

We humans are finite beings. We have a beginning and an end. Everything around us is also finite. Everything around us has a beginning and an end. How did everything begin if there was nothing to start with. If there was some energy or something. How did it come into existence ?

From this alone I conclude that some infinite being created the universe and I would like to call this being God.

Its all big bang, but we dont know the why or the how (yet), all we know is when it happened.

If you get a chance try to get hold of Stephen Hawkings A briefer history of time

 

[SharekhaN]

earth-> solar system->milky way->universe->something->something->something....

where does it end? My puny brain cant handle the existence of something that is completely infinite. It goes against what science has taught me about mass and matter.

So I tend to keep a bit of faith in the supernatural.

 

[Hacker]

How did the whole universe begin if it is finite ?

From this alone I conclude that some infinite being created the universe and I would like to call this being God.

Who says the universe is finite??

If everything was created by God, then who created God?

Just because we dont have answers for life right now, does not mean that it was created by god, earlier humans used to think that diseases were created by god, but now you know viruses and bacteria cause them.

So sit back and relax for 100 - 1000 years and science will give you your answers slowly.

 

[6pack]

@blr_p, nicely explained there.

Imo, there might be things faster than light out there, its just we haven't yet found them.

 

[Brendon]

Ill started with hydrogen that got compressed into heavier elements within the stars who then exploded and become heavier stars who then exploded etc. Consider that the universe is dated at about 15 billion years old so there was plenty of time for stuff to form.

You can say everything that the earth & nearby planets started off with comes from the stars.

How did the hydrogen get there in the first place is something ppl are trying to figure out. We can get very close in time to the moment of the big bang, but as to why it even happened in the first place is not known currently

Answers were supposed to be forthcoming with the big hadron collider in Geneva but thats still under repairs and won't be up & running till Feb i think. It won't really start pushing the limits for at least a cpl more years yet till they can get it stable.

I'm not sure if the universe is finite i understand that it is expanding. That galaxies are actually drifting away from each other with speed.

Perhaps but what are the chances that it could not happen amongst hundreds of billions of stars within our own galaxy let alone the other billions of galaxies with their individual billions of stars out there

The distances are so vast between these galaxies that light itself might take thousands if not millions of years to cover the distance between.

Its all big bang, but we dont know the why or the how (yet), all we know is when it happened.

If you get a chance try to get hold of Stephen Hawkings A briefer history of time

I hope you are aware that the big bang theory is just a theory and it remains to this day just one of many theories.

There are a lot of problems and inconsistencies with the big bang theory. The most problematic one is that it violates the First Law of Thermodynamics that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Now the law of Thermodynamics is a law because it can be proven and its not a theory like say the Theory of evolution and the big bang.

BB top 30 problems

 

[Brendon]

Who says the universe is finite??

I do ! hyeah: But then again if you believe the bigbang theory then it states that the universe is finite but expanding in size.

If everything was created by God, then who created God?

That's the whole concept of an infinite being isn't it ? There is no beginning and no end. God simply exits. Again we are finite beings (I hope I don't have to prove that ! :bleh: ) and so it is difficult to comprehend such things because we are making our judgment at a fixed point in time and at a fixed point in the universe.

Just because we dont have answers for life right now, does not mean that it was created by god, earlier humans used to think that diseases were created by god, but now you know viruses and bacteria cause them.

So sit back and relax for 100 - 1000 years and science will give you your answers slowly.

But how did Viruses and Bacteria come to exist ? Has anyone seen any living organism created out of nothing anywhere in the universe?

Do you really believe that even if somehow some living organism was created, by chance it suddenly got the ability to reproduce. Then it by chance it got the ability to divide its cells and become multi-cellular organisms, then by chance some became small fish and some became bigger fish.

Then by chance some of these fish landed on shore and became amphibians. Then by chance some amphibians became mammals. And by chance some mammals evolved into apes. And by some chance some of those apes became man and by chance no other species of apes evolved to anything close to the intellect of man.

That's a lot of chances for me to digest !

 

[Arun1]

Wow! Nice thought provoking thread.

Here's my take on this.I believe quite a few people in this thread are like me who don't believe in religion and thus what is known as a personal God i.e. to say that we don't believe in some imaginary omnipresent being whose only job is to to constantly monitor each and every activity of ours and judge us and reward us from time to time if we respect it sincerely and pray and punish us if we don't.

On the other hand we feel there isn't enough evidence to prove or disprove that an intelligent being created the universe,we still can't seem to answer what happened before the big bang or what triggered it but one thing we know for sure is that even if there was a God that helped create the universe ,that God is pretty much irrelevant as far as our lives are concerned.

But how did Viruses and Bacteria come to exist ? Has anyone seen any living organism created out of nothing anywhere in the universe?

Do you really believe that even if somehow some living organism was created, by chance it suddenly got the ability to reproduce. Then it by chance it got the ability to divide its cells and become multi-cellular organisms, then by chance some became small fish and some became bigger fish.

Then by chance some of these fish landed on shore and became amphibians. Then by chance some amphibians became mammals. And by chance some mammals evolved into apes. And by some chance some of those apes became man and by chance no other species of apes evolved to anything close to the intellect of man.

That's a lot of chances for me to digest !

Do some reading on the theory of evolution,not just the basic stuff we learnt in school but a bit more deep.You'd realize that contrary to you opinion there is hardly anything that has been left to chance in the process of evolution .It is infact a very slow and extremely long process of continuous trial and error.

 

[6pack]

But how did Viruses and Bacteria come to exist ? Has anyone seen any living organism created out of nothing anywhere in the universe?

i can give you two easy practicals which you can do to see how living beings are born out of nothing or say from a non living thing.

1 - take a slice of bread. leave it in a place for some time uncovered till it gets stale. you will find mold growing on it.

2 - take a spoon of curd (yogurt). keep it covered at room temp for few days. You will see small worms coming out of it. where did the worms come from when the curd has just bacteria in it? evolution.

 

[GameNome]

But how did Viruses and Bacteria come to exist ? Has anyone seen any living organism created out of nothing anywhere in the universe?

We have created amino acids and nucleic acids which are the basic buliding blocks of life in our laboratories from simple molecules which were present in the earths atmosphere at that time.
I think abiogeneisis is more plausible than believing something we have never seen or have any single minute shred of evidence for plonked us upon the earth.

Do you really believe that even if somehow some living organism was created, by chance it suddenly got the ability to reproduce. Then it by chance it got the ability to divide its cells and become multi-cellular organisms, then by chance some became small fish and some became bigger fish.

Then by chance some of these fish landed on shore and became amphibians. Then by chance some amphibians became mammals. And by chance some mammals evolved into apes. And by some chance some of those apes became man and by chance no other species of apes evolved to anything close to the intellect of man.

That's a lot of chances for me to digest !

Your paragraph sounds like a childish argument really.
Its alot more complicated than that, many factors come into play like random mutations, habitat, isolation. Taking into account the fact that this happened over billions of years there is a lot more probability of evolution than you think.

i can give you two easy practicals which you can do to see how living beings are born out of nothing or say from a non living thing.

1 - take a slice of bread. leave it in a place for some time uncovered till it gets stale. you will find mold growing on it.

2 - take a spoon of curd (yogurt). keep it covered at room temp for few days. You will see small worms coming out of it. where did the worms come from when the curd has just bacteria in it? evolution.

To be fair that is not a good example really, they are born out of something i.e the spores.

 

[chiron]

I hope you are aware that the big bang theory is just a theory and it remains to this day just one of many theories.

There are a lot of problems and inconsistencies with the big bang theory. The most problematic one is that it violates the First Law of Thermodynamics that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Now the law of Thermodynamics is a law because it can be proven and its not a theory like say the Theory of evolution and the big bang.

BB top 30 problems

I guess the discussion has turned to the inevitable science vs religion and evolution didn't happen just by chance arguments which have simply come up to provide more literal justification for the events describled in the Bible rather than to try and understand how things work.

Which is why hundreds of sites like this exist; Was Darwin right home page exist. And while legitimate scientific principles have led to most of the conveniences we have right now, I don't know what people who dispute Darwin etc have come up in terms of usefulness other than to dispute scientific theories.

These arguments are all typically based on the "straw man" arguments.

There is a still lot of relevance to the religious texts even so many years after they were written in terms of morality and spirituality rather than in understanding physical phenomena.

I'm not saying that research isn't clouded by people's personal opinion/politics/business interests or even religion but at its core science simply tries to do exactly that.

 

[qsahmed]

this out this webpage

PROVING THE EXISTENCE OF ALLAH TO AN ATHEIST

 

[blr_p]

I hope you are aware that the big bang theory is just a theory and it remains to this day just one of many theories.

There is a misunderstanding with the word theory as used in science as compared to english. See this.

In science, a hypothesis is an idea about something that seems probable, while a theory has been tested and is supported by evidence.

So when you say theory in English, it actually means hypothesis in science

As to how good this theory is, wiki says

The Big Bang is the cosmological model of the initial conditions and subsequent development of the universe that is supported by the most comprehensive and accurate explanations from current scientific evidence and observation.

So in plain english Big Bang is not 'just a theory' but has good support.

There are a lot of problems and inconsistencies with the big bang theory.

See below in above referenced wiki article

While very few researchers now doubt the Big Bang occurred, the scientific community was once divided between supporters of the Big Bang and those of alternative cosmological models. Throughout the historical development of the subject, problems with the Big Bang theory were posed in the context of a scientific controversy regarding which model could best describe the cosmological observations.

With the overwhelming consensus in the community today supporting the Big Bang model, many of these problems are remembered as being mainly of historical interest; the solutions to them have been obtained either through modifications to the theory or as the result of better observations.

The most problematic one is that it violates the First Law of Thermodynamics that energy cannot be created or destroyed.

This is a common misunderstanding, see here & here

the BBT is not about the origin of the universe, but rather its development with time. Hence, any statement that the appearance of the universe "out of nothing" is impossible has nothing to do with what the BBT actually addresses. Likewise, while the laws of thermodynamics apply to the universe today, it is not clear that they necessarily apply to the origin of the universe; we simply do not know. Finally, it is not clear that one can sensibly talk about time "before the Big Bang". "Time" is an integral part of our universe (hence the GR term "spacetime") - so it is not clear how exactly one would characterize the energy before and after the Big Bang in a precise enough way to conclude it was not conserved.

Now the law of Thermodynamics is a law because it can be proven and its not a theory like say the Theory of evolution and the big bang.

See above.

BB top 30 problems

Googled for this as it was not clear who the author was and found it appeared in a magazine called Apieron, Vol.9, Numer 2, (April 2002)

Wiki says

Apeiron is the name of a scientific journal and publisher of books on studies in infinite nature. It is a quarterly international publication started in 1987. Apeiron publishes theoretical and experimental work in a wide variety of fields within physics, but is especially noted for publishing alternative theories of cosmology, relativity and quantum mechanics.

Apeiron is applying a peer review system involving internationally established researchers, most of whom, however, cannot be regarded as mainstream. Apeiron has become a forum for "dissident" researchers and opinions not accepted by the conventional system. Apeiron has had notable contributions from authors involved in the early work of quantum mechanics and relativity such as Jean-Pierre Vigier.

I would be sceptical of anything coming out of this publication.

 

[PaulBarber]

Whether God exists or not, belief in God has some very positive effects. Gives you strength and courage to handle even the toughest situations. I've seen the positive effects that really strong belief can bring to people. It's truly amazing.

Doesnt matter what God you believe in, it's your belief that gives you the strength (a purely psychological phenomenon - if you ask me).It's your subconscious mind and the power of positive thinking at work.

It's like when you are a child, you have your parents to look after you. Now that you are an adult, it gives you courage and strength to have an imaginary godfather looking after you all the time. Yeah...maybe it's just plain insecurity and fear of the unknown.

BTW - I don't believe in God, I would like to, but I'm unable to

It's too far-fetched for me.