immortal

There is so much to explore, I always wondered how nature finds such amazing design solutions to some of the variety of biological life that we see on earth, while evolution by natural selection explains a lot of things as to how such novel designs arosed, there are many biochemical aspects and mechanisms which we yet to discover, there can be many other possiblities, the designers could be some kind of aliens or some thing very different which is beyond our imagination, the fact that there is so much we yet don't know is what excites me.

http://www.websterworld.com/websterworld/scienceupdates/t/thereturnofcreationismise159.html http://www.websterworld.com/websterworld/scitreas/i/intelligentdesign849.html Intelligent Design cannot be science and hence it shouldn't be taught in a science class. The theory on its own can do wonders by being outside of science.

I wouldn't call a different methodology based on a different axiom as science, if that is not the case then even Intelligent Design and vitalism would classify as a science. There can be other methodologies but such methods have to lie with in positivism to be called as science.

First, what we know of God is very little, if you study a religious tradition particularly from religious scholars who have made an indepth study of scriptures and have worked day and night to figure out the meaning behind those statements and who have implemented it in their lives and are good practioners of religion then yes, god should appear the same way across thousands of years of time to different people, people like St. Thomas Aquinas makes arguments that God is immutable and revelations provide support to such claims, religion almost works in the same way as science, I wouldn't call it science because the evidence is not repeatable. To say that the idea of god is just a concept in our brains and God exists as just a concept or patterns in brain is to do injustice to religion, there is more to it than just a mere concept. No, no, I'm not in favor of such type of religious thinking, I think such thinking has more to do with other social and political factors rather than thought processes which are purely based on the metaphysical nature of religion. In fact religion says everyone and every species is equal in the eyes of God becuase God resides in every living thing, that's what it teaches us.

The very act of worshiping a god requires one to assume he exists, its not a problem as long as one knows that its not enough to assert something as true and existing, I noticed that evolutionary biologist, Kenneth Miller visiting a church and praying to God, if we can seperate God from making our important decisions in our lives so that it doesn't interfere with the world we live in then its not a problem. However if you do some crazy things which affects society in a great way assuming he exists based on faith alone then its madness. You say that scholars have tried to prove the existence of God for thousands of years and yet they have failed terribly, the fact that many are convinced that he exists is quite contrary to your statement, they're convinced because they have seen and communicated with god, being practical means to follow in the path of such scholars, the path may be a blind path, I might rationalize it with out any evidence but the journey is worth taking since it removes the uncertainty in our minds as to whether god exists or not. I am in support of religious thinking as a whole and I'm not arguing for the existence of my favoured version of god. So the popularity of a certain belief is not is question.

We still don't know the causes of abiogenesis on earth, so the purpose of life evolving is open for speculation, if the problem is solvable with in science then it was just an emergent property, it was an another big bang in the cosmos, it has no purpose.

The premise from few religious scholars is that we are living in some kind of immersive reality, so we are not made aware of that "external mind", I prefixed the term external before "mind" to differentiate the reductionist approach of science to equate mind with brain. This is the main reason why religion and science don't overlap, the existence of such a mind is non-empirical, we don't have to accept such claims from religious scholars to be true but we can certainly investigate them. The way the science thinks is that it can pretty much explain every single phenomena with in empirical observation so there is no need to invoke the existence of an external mind since there is no need and no evidence to accept it but if a phenomena doesn't causually interact with the empirical world then there is no way of testifying it with in the empirical world, so the position that is taken is to look for that external mind knowing that there is nothing in the empirical world to provide us evidence of the existence of such a mind. Or in other words why empirical reality is the only reality out there, there might be other realities which don't causually interact with our world. This the reason why religion and science don't have to contradict with each other, they both are concerned of different worlds. Ofcourse the world we live in is fairly a big place, my assertion is causually linked if Thor or any other god is responsible for our observed reality, i.e the way it is given to us and not the way it exists as it is. In other words religion has more to do with psychology rather than the Big Bang. Studying scriptures and having faith alone takes you to no where, we have to question ourselves how much time we have spent to know god through revelations and in what way we have tried to achieve it. Religion is more about being practical than having theoretical knowledge. Scriptures alone gives you zero knowledge.

The question is why do religious people have strong beliefs in God despite the lack of empirical evidence. There can be many other possibilities but as Villain mentioned earlier these are the most likely answers to that question. 1. Either our genetic machinery and other environmental factors shape the behaviours of some people to accept something as true with out any positive evidence. 2. Or revelations are not delusional and there is evidence for god and that explains the behaviours of such practicing religious people. I myself am not convinced of my position, so I'm not trying to convince anyone, if I knew god exists I would have taken a more positive take on religion and asserted that the second conclusion is true and the correct one and my committment to religion would increase by tenfold. I don't know god exists or not, so I'm not convincing anyone, I'm questioning the validity of your arguments and others. Why can't we just let scientific advancements and other cultural changes through religion in the near future to answer that question rather than concluding things based on a personal bias. Having the ability to have revelations means to have the ability to see one's external mind, this is the first self-validation which proves that what they're observing or experiencing is true and is based in reality. You cannot pass such a test by making stuff up or by making random speculation, there can be many questions that can be asked to test the validity of your experience like you would be asked to describe the detailed appearance of the anthropomorphic god. So the only way to know whether there is any truth in it is to find out the root cause of such experiences.

They're not just told or forced to accept it without any evidence, they are given access to scriptures only after they attain the ability to validate its statements. Are you suggesting that these religious scholars are so dumb that they cannot even differentiate between a hallucination and a genuine divine experience with identical experiential content across different people from the same traditions, i.e from the masters to their disciples. Your dismissal of such literature as delusional is quite ill founded.

They're not forced to accept anything, every statement from the scriptures is self-validated through revelations, it is not based on just faith alone, such a line of reasoning is enough to covince one's own intellect and if he displays some extraordinary phenomena that would be enough to convince others to accept the extraordinary claim of god's existence. There are a variety of scholars out there, some base their arguments on logic and reason while some base it entirely on one's own and others revelation and if you study the literature of such latter kind of scholars one has to think twice before rejecting them, there is nothing personal about my position.

Okay if anyone concludes that god exists without any adequate evidence then he can be considered broken. There are different kinds of religious thinking, in some traditions you're not even given access to scriptures until you have the ability to have revelations, so not all religious thinking fall into that domain of irrationaity. Thanks for clearing it up, yes, good point, faith is not strength, we need to make them aware that they have no knowledge what so ever to those theists who argue from faith alone. Although I don't agree with many of your conclusions, how can you be so sure that religious knowledge is delusional, how do you know? and also you seem to have made up your mind that religious people make stuff up on their own, no religion is hard work, it is as hard work as scienific enquiry, calling all relgious knowledge to be just wishful thinking is very much wrong and inaccurate.

That's exactly my point religious practices has nothing to do with fulfilling our day-to day activities of eating and survival, they're not doing it for mere survival, religious people think that life is more than just survival, one of the common things about practicing religious people is that they're disassociated with the world, they have no interests in this world. Religion has nothing to do with this world. The evidence from revelation are not repeatable and hence it doesn't meets the criteria of scientific evidence but such a evidence is non-empirical. Now don't ask god could've done this or he could've done that, we don't have much knowledge of god to speculate on what is going in his mind. If you're looking for empirical evidence of god you will not find a single thing because such an evidence has to come from a theist who knows and worships God. So if you don't want to invest your time in god don't do it but why do you have to criticize religious thinking if it doesn't affect you in anyway. You make a false comparison of religion with raping innocent children or throwing acid into someone's face and such people do need to be made to look upon down by others and I appreciate the effort you put to make someone question their own religious beliefs and their worldviews, I can see your purpose but in the process you are trying to suppress religious thinking and speculation as a whole which is not right IMO. There are different kind of theists out there, you're doing injustice by generalizing all theists in the same bandwagon. I disagree with your assertion that we need to stick with critical and analytic thinking and stop investing our time in god, not all theists go on preaching about god assuming he exists, it is a personal endevour to many, just because they abandon logic and reason while investigating one aspect of their lives i.e religion or god doesn't necessarily mean that they're broken and such blind actions follow up in other social aspects of their lives. I know it often does which is quite unfortunate. That's exactly which I'm so unsure of, I'm not convinced yet that it is a delusion and it is this uncertainty which pushes me to investigate such experiences and to cast doubt on the realness of empirical reality itself. I can't buy your claim so easily. The default position from the scientific community is to completely dismiss it. I don't have to equate science with religion, no. Religion is not science but as a branch of philosophy it stands on its own in guiding us to the truth.

Your demand for an "empirical" evidence is an extraordinary demand. That's why. A theist could accept such a challenge but he has to believe in god and worship him to gain any knowledge in the first place. Instead of asking evidence via revelation you're asking evidence via your eyes. Religion doesn't make much sense if you confuse religious claims to be empirical claims, religion is non-empirical. All religious knowledge comes from revelation, one cannot have revelation without divine intervention and gods won't appear to you until you worship them. No one(even a theist) has to accept it as absolutely true unless one can see god but if a theist wants to know god and investigate him he is free to do so he is not broken by any means as long as he knows that faith alone is not enough to start preaching about god to anyone else to convince his own intellect. I'm afraid that's how religion works. Does it really work in bringing some valuable knowledge? I don't know. A god hypothesis is an equally competing hypothesis outside from science for explaining our origins.

Are we born religious? - Scientific American If the strong inclination towards a belief whether it is of strong atheism or fundamentalism is shaped by our genes and our environment then it would be wrong to call them as broken. Here is evolutionary pyschology explaining why a group of people who demand evidence to accept something in all their aspects of their lives somehow don't question and criticize their own religious beliefs and just accept it as true without any evidence. Such behaviours can be fairly explained by evolutionary psychology. So we were programmed by our genes and by our environment to hold such beliefs and that explains the behaviours of majority of theists who come here. The study also indicate that spiritual people tend to help people irrespective of whether they belong to the same ethnicity, whether thy know that person or not. It is these kind of behaviours which is harder to explain by evolutionary pyschological terms, the unknown persons are not their kin and yet they sacrifice and spend a lot of energy in helping them, it is these behavious which challenge our thinking of evolutionary origins and naturalism. So it all boils down to what kind of evidence is accepted and what is rejected. It is really stupid from the context of this thread to demand empirical evidence of god and at the same time accuse religious people for believing in a god without any evidence. To bring empirical evidence you need to believe and have faith in god and worship him and invest one's time in him. To me evidence of god is not in the Holy scriptures it is in religious scholars who have constantly claimed to have experienced God and describe God in and out and even describe him with so much detail that they infact describe what gems and jewellery he is wearing, surely a hallucinating experience cannot give such information content to anyone and wouldn't affect their lives so much seeing the commitment that they show to their religious practices. A single religious scholar's experience cannot be evidence of anything but if you add different religious scholars across diffeent cultures at different times you have a strong case in favor of religion. The study also makes an interesting finding that our sense of right and wrong i.e morals doesn't come from religion it comes from our personality and genes.

In polytheistic religions you can worship the supreme godhead as a whole or you can worship them individually like you can worship the god of fire etc but I don't think a Jew or a Muslim has such kind of liberty.

In a pantheon of gods, we will have one god for fire, another one for earth and so on for water and space etc. If gods exist they control every aspect of our reality it doesn't only have to be a water cycle. There will be a supreme Godhead or the God of the Gods who commands the whole pantheon and every aspect of reality. So there is no reason why a polytheistic god cannot be a better explanation for the smooth functioning of the world than a monotheistic god anymore.

I see no reason why a pantheon of Gods cannot possibly give rise to a smooth functioning of the world.

How and why on earth a monotheistic god is more likely than a polytheistic pantheon of gods, a monotheistic god may look more reasonable to you. I am a born Hindu and I don't invest my time on worshiping those innumerous Gods because they aren't convincing and reasonable enough to invest time in them, that doesn't mean they don't exist, its just they cannot be falsifiable. Reality is what it is, all religions of the world stands on its own, one should be careful while eliminating polytheistic gods otherwise you have a bias towards monotheistic gods and that's a display of double standards.

Isn't philosophy of religion a field of philosophy? http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-religion/#FieSig Religion has more value and good tools than metaphysics to gain some real knowledge.

I think there is a threshold point, anyone who doubts the existence of God and knows that faith alone is not enough to accept something as true and as Kierkegaard puts it to have faith means to be inherently doubtful is below the threshold point and is not broken and anyone who has absolute beliefs without any doubt in the absence of evidence and deny the existence of other Gods and claim that only their version of god is true is above the threshold point and they might be called broken.

Soren Kierkegaard equated faith to love. People who believe in God are testing God(s) claims, if that is broken then people who fall in love are also broken. There is an element of rationality behind faith.

Empirical world - the observable world, the world which we see through our biological natural eyes. Virtual world - the virtual immersive world, the world which we see through our avatar or through the eyes of a virtual body. Real (empirical) world - assuming our observable natural world is real. As long as you cannot know god the default position is that you're an agnostic, once you know god you're a gnostic.

The Upanishads have no authors, God gave it to the world through the means of few men, it is no one's property, it belongs to the people of the world, however just for namesake... "You realize beyond all trace of doubt that the world is in you and not you in the world" -- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj "You are the entire universe. You are in all, and all is in you. Sun,moon, and stars revolve within you." -- Swami Muktananda "The Universe produced phenomenally in me, is pervaded by me. From me the world the world is born, in me it exists, in me it dissolves." -- Ashtavakra Gita

When I was highly influenced by the Selfish gene theory the only point of my life was "I want to produce offsprings". Evolution by natural selection is blind, it has no purpose.

Thinking that you're not your body but an entity outside of the universe is quite psychotic indeed but who knows what other perceptions of the world are possible.