Why you don't believe?

[swansont]

Some people did not believe because they did not see. Are their really sure what they can't see really don't exist?

And that's the kind of crap that helped turn me off from religion. It puts the onus on me. It's my flaw that I cannot see, rather than the fault of an omniscient being for convincing me. Why did God make me in a way that I can't accept her? Seems kind of cruel and devious.

 

Consider for example radio waves. You can't see but you know it exist.

We can do tests to see that radio waves exist.

[Sensei]

Probe your own body thru a microscope and you will see cells with complexities. Little machineries which defies evolution.

Absolute nonsense.

You can even see natural selection at work through microscope,

how bacteria is surviving not enough dose of medicine, and their new generation is alive, and resistant for it..

 

 

As well in the universe. Infinitude of stars you will see at night, where you could probably wonder what is the source of their unfaltering energy.

 

Energy for star comes obviously from nuclear fusion reaction.

 

Fusion of proton with proton:

[math]p^+ + p^+ \rightarrow D^+ + e^+ + v_e + 0.42 MeV[/math]

 

Annihilation of positron (created above) with electron:

[math]e^+ + e^- \rightarrow \gamma + \gamma + 1.022 MeV[/math]

 

Fusion of Deuterium with yet another proton:

[math]D^+ + p^+ \rightarrow ^3_2He + \gamma + 5.49 MeV[/math]

 

Fusion of Helium-3 result in production of Helium-4 and two new protons:

[math]^3_2He + ^3_2He \rightarrow ^4_2He + p^+ + p^+ + 12.86 MeV[/math]

 

From all these reactions there is created energy:

0.42 + 1.022 + 0.42 + 1.022 + 5.49 + 5.49 + 12.86 MeV = 26.724 MeV

which is exactly difference between mass-energy of four Hydrogen and single Helium-4:

4.0026 u * 931.494 MeV/u = 3728.4 MeV (He-4 mass-energy)

938.272 MeV + 0.511 MeV = 938.783 MeV (H-1 mass-energy)

4 * 938.783 MeV - 3728.4 MeV = 26.732 MeV

 

[swansont]

Probe your own body thru a microscope and you will see cells with complexities. Little machineries which defies evolution. As well in the universe. Infinitude of stars you will see at night, where you could probably wonder what is the source of their unfaltering energy.

 

 

Is argument from personal incredulity all you have?

[Function]

(Astro)physicist Carl Sagan said that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

 

Absence of evidence of consciousness in a comatous (too short-sighted term, but let's stick with that for now) state does not let itself be deduced to the evidence of absence of consciousness (which could have very far reaching consequences)

 

Ergo, as long as it is not proven that there is a god or isn't, there both is and isn't a god.

 

[something went wrong editing my message, but something here said something about having to consider the possibility of the OP's god both existing and not existing until it has been proven that his god exists]

 

And as long as Team Science (sorry OP, but I'm on that team) can't prove there isn't a god, not merely by noticing there is no evidence of presence, thus to pronounce the absence of evidence, then it must be considered a possibility that his god exists whatsoever, since the absence was not proven.

 

Since none of the possible evidences are realistic (neither the evidence of presence, nor the evidence of absence), we won't ever come to an agreement and we should let religion remain a most personal thing, of which the purpose and meaning to a person is non negotiable.

 

In conclusion: as long as the OP can't prove the presence of a god, then his god is as meaningful as Schrödinger's cat.

Edited January 30, 2017 by Function

[dimreepr]

In conclusion: as long as the OP can't prove the presence of a god, then his god is as meaningful as Schrödinger's cat.

 

There is another possible meaning:

 

I believe the bible is trying to teach contentment and that god is a teaching aid, and a comfort for those who can't find peace

 

 

But the OP has yet to answer.

[Arete]

The OP implies that belief is a choice - it is not. If a person does not find the evidence for something compelling, no amount of wishful thinking is going to change their belief in the subject.

 

To offer a personal anecdote - I was raised in a Christian household, went to Sunday school, etc. About the age I started to critically think about what adults told me (11 or so, maybe?), I inadvertently stumbled upon the Epicurean problem of evil in my own thinking:

 

1. There is evil/suffering in the world.

2. God is omniscient, so it knows there is evil/suffering.

3. God is omnipotent, so God can end evil/suffering.

4. God is omnibenevolent, so God cares that there is evil/suffering.

5. Therefore God is either not omniscient/omnipotent/omnibenevolent, or does not exist.

 

When I came to my supposed religious mentors with this issue, I was treated as a troublemaker, or I was told not to try and understand God. The spell was broken. As I began to doubt, further inconsistencies appeared - how could a perfect being create an imperfect world? Doesn't that make the being itself imperfect? How come the Bible has so many inconsistencies? How come so many Bible stories contradict reality? Ultimately the belief system itself collapsed under the scrutiny of a curious pre teen.

 

With so many unanswered questions I was simply unable to continue believing. It wasn't an active choice I made.

Edited January 30, 2017 by Arete

[Air Between The Notes]

How about God allows all you quoted to build our character & come to our end so that we have to turn to Him in order to start a genuine relationship?

[Function]

 

But the OP has yet to answer.

 

About that quote: at some times, I wish I'd had faith.

[dimreepr]

 

About that quote: at some times, I wish I'd had faith.

 

To be honest, despite my atheism, I wish we all did.

[Function]

 

To be honest, despite my atheism, I wish we all did.

 

A toast to that.

[Thorham]

Lack of evidence of a creator being's existence or non-existence leads me to say that I don't know. What I do know is that beings capable of creating universes don't need holy books filled with utter nonsense to try and convince anyone to believe in them.

Edited January 30, 2017 by Thorham

[MonDie]

Regarding the Christian God.

 

Any god would likely be in contact with all human societies, and strict adherence to any particular religion over the others requires an either/or, all-or-nothing mode of thought that is likely to result in error.

 

Pascal's wager doesn't work when you consider that you have the option to continue asking questions. In the absence of one overwhelmingly likely possibility, it is better not to conclude and to continue inquiring.

 

The problem of evil. God must know right from wrong.

 

 

On the other hand, I appear to be accessing some sort of subconscious or alternate-hemisphere thoughts, and maybe I'm grasping what women mean by "intuition". It is a peculiar thing that could be interpreted as evidence of a higher power since it does sometimes look like communication from another consciousness. Thus this experience has unsettled my atheistic attitudes somewhat.

[Sensei]

1. There is evil/suffering in the world.

2. God is omniscient, so it knows there is evil/suffering.

3. God is omnipotent, so God can end evil/suffering.

4. God is omnibenevolent, so God cares that there is evil/suffering.

5. Therefore God is either not omniscient/omnipotent/omnibenevolent, or does not exist.

 

You forgot about free will.

If God would destroy evil, it would be against free will.

And everybody would be like slaves or robots just doing computer procedure..

Reaction for event, would be execution of the exactly the same procedure, in exactly the same place.

[dimreepr]

The problem of evil. God must know right from wrong.

 

 

If god is a teaching aid to the path of peace, then evil is just the antipodes of peace; so if evil is just a path that leads one from peace; then god can be as ignorant as all of us.

[Arete]

 

You forgot about free will.

If God would destroy evil, it would be against free will.

And everybody would be like slaves or robots just doing computer procedure..

Reaction for event, would be execution of the exactly the same procedure, in exactly the same place.

 

1) Plenty of suffering is independent of free will - natural disasters, disease, famine etc.

 

2) An omnipotent being can allow free will without suffering. "Another line of extended criticism of free will defense has been that if God is perfectly powerful, knowing and loving, then he could have actualized a world with free creatures without moral evil where everyone chooses good, is always full of loving-kindness, is compassionate, always non-violent and full of joy, where earth were just like the monotheistic concept of heaven" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil

Edited January 30, 2017 by Arete

[Sensei]

The problem of evil. God must know right from wrong.

What is right, and what is wrong, is often relative.

 

Disaster 65 millions years ago from humans point of view is "good", as without it they would not exist..

At the same time, it's "evil" for dinosaurs and majority of living organisms, at that time..

 

Delicious dinner is "good" for majority of Christian families, they thank God for these "gifts",

but somebody had to die to land on their plates, in the first place.

 

ps. I am eating meat every day, so don't treat it as promotion of vegetarianism, or veganism..

 

1) Plenty of suffering is independent of free will - natural disasters, disease, famine etc.

What with free will of God.. ?

 

Can't he/she/it do whatever wants?

 

"free will" at quantum level is in randomness of what will happen with particles..

 

The all asteroids, comets, are all there, orbiting for billions years, new one are made after they hit randomly each other in distant space,

and it's not question whether they will hit Earth (or any other planet), but when they will hit Earth.

Humans, with free will, can be smart and prepared, or be stupid, pray and wait, maybe nothing will happen.

 

2) An omnipotent being can allow free will without suffering.

Humans don't produce food from Sun, or any other energy source, directly.

To survive somebody else, whether it's vegetable or other animal, has to die

(except couple exceptions like milk, and its byproducts, fruits etc.)

In this case, other living organisms are the one which are suffering..

 

Christians and Muslims (and others) especially believe in supremacy of humans.

which is quite visible in how they use (extremely not optimally) natural resources.

They treat this planet as an opencast mine, which can be devastated to any level,

because of what they read in Bible..

Edited January 30, 2017 by Sensei

[Schell]

As a Christian, I want to ask those who don't believe in God, why they don't believe, what encourages or pushes them to not believe? What is the exact reason why they don;t believe?

Are their reasons completely enough to firmly hold their positions?

Before holding their position, did they think first?

Did they balance things first?

Are they able to check their own selves or hear their own inner selves before deciding to hold their postions?

 

I am curious about this....

Feedbacks are very much appreciated. Thank You...

 

I find it hard to believe that people still ask this question. Without wishing to be disparaging, it's a stupid question. It would be very stupid of me to ask you what pushes you to not believe in Odin or Atet. In truth, there are no reasons I can think of why you should believe in either of these gods, anymore than there are for atheists to believe that yours exists.

 

The exact reason they don't believe is the same one you have for not believing in all the other gods. That is not only enough reason to hold the position, it is more than enough, as you well know since you're in the same position.

 

Belief in gods are taught to us from an early age and they are re-enforced by society as a whole on a daily basis. Anyone who doesn't reflect on the issue will more than likely continue to believe it, at least passively. Only those who "think about it" can possibly come to the conclusion that it's not true. So yes, we have thought about it, a great deal and comprehensively, and that's why we don't believe it.

 

I have no idea what you mean by "did they balance things first"?. The question is perfectly balanced because there's a dearth of evidence in support of the claim. We should only believe it if there's a positive bias, tipping the scales in favour of the claim.

[dimreepr]

 

The question is perfectly balanced because there's a dearth of evidence in support of the claim.

 

Then it's not balanced.

[Schell]

Many revised theories had been proposed in the pre-bigbang moment, Vilenkin's model have flaws and other competing models.

 

There are no 'pre-big bang' theories. there might be some hypotheses.

 

For example the multiverse theory of Alan Guth. The problem of this theory is where is the source of the energy fueling the multiverse came from? And if it is only from nothingness, how come nothingness produce something?

 

If there was nothingness, where did your god come from? If there was something or somewhere before your god, where did it come from? If your god made everything, what existed before then? If nothing existed before then, where did the god exist?

It seems there are a great many questions which we struggle to answer, and saying that it's all the result of a magic friend of yours, isn't a satisfactory answer.

I'm asking you what is the reason it (belief) is not the default?

 

Because reasonable people need reasons to accept claims, especially if these claims are outlandish? Why is that difficult to get your noodle round?

 

Some people did not believe because they did not see. Are their really sure what they can't see really don't exist?

 

We don't have to be sure, this is not a question of knowledge but of belief.

 

Consider for example radio waves. You can't see but you know it exist.

We don't have to see something to know that it's real. We have sufficient evidence of radio waves such that it's perfectly reasonable to accept that they exist. Do you have anything remotely comparative to that evidence which might support your claims about the god?

 

Then it's not balanced.

 

Of course it is. You have a proposition which you wish to weigh up. On one side you put all the evidence in favour, after which on the other side you put all the evidence against. The scales are balanced before we begin and we have yet to see anything put on the side in support of the proposition. There is nothing on the other side because as yet there is nothing substantive to negate. So we have a status quo - balance.

[iNow]

Meta comment: Please use regular font without changing the color. You're making your posts unnecessarily more difficult to read.

[Function]

Meta comment: Please use regular font without changing the color. You're making your posts unnecessarily more difficult to read.

 

Meta reply in the world's most hated font: not to mention the time you _could ^saveup doing something more useful (what a sh*tty colour) without editing every sentence in your post!

Edited January 30, 2017 by Function

[ydoaPs]

As a Christian, I want to ask those who don't believe in God, why they don't believe, what encourages or pushes them to not believe? What is the exact reason why they don;t believe?

Are their reasons completely enough to firmly hold their positions?

Before holding their position, did they think first?

Did they balance things first?

Are they able to check their own selves or hear their own inner selves before deciding to hold their postions?

 

I am curious about this....

Feedbacks are very much appreciated. Thank You...

It's all about evidence and how it impacts how likely things are. To incorporate new information into a probability, we use something called "Bayes's Rule":

 

[math]P(hypothesis|evidence) = \frac{P(evidence|hypothesis)\times{P(hypothesis)}}{P(evidence)}[/math]

 

Now, the question is: "How likely is it that Christianity is true?". We can come up with a minimal version of Christianity. As far as I am concerned, anything that is properly called "Christianity" has at least these things in common, though I'm sure many people would require many more:

• Jesus was the product of a virgin birth
• Jesus rose from the dead after 3 days
• God exists

That means we're looking to see how we can estimate P(Jesus was born of a virgin AND Jesus rose from the dead AND God exists). When you're looking at the probability of a conjunction, you're looking at multiplication of fractions. There

s no way around that. We know right off the bat that the answer will be (a number less than 1)x(another number less than one)x(yet another number less than one). If we say that each of them has the probability of 75%, then we end up with a probability of 42%. But we're not talking about things with probability anywhere near 75%. 75% of the people you meet aren't born of a virgin. 75% of the people you meet aren't going to pop out of their graves after three days.

 

There have been about 100billion people on Earth thusfar. Let's be extremely generous and say that 100 have been born of a virgin and 100 have risen from the dead after three days. That means that each of them is 1 in a billion. That means that together (there's no obvious link between the two causing one to be more likely in the presence of the other, so I'll treat them as independent)the probability is 1 in one quintillion. And since we need to factor in the existence of God on top of that, we know it will be some fraction of that.

 

But how likely is the existence of God?

 

We can figure that out by thinking about the relation between mind and matter. If everything (including mind) comes from matter, that's called "Source Materialism". If everything comes from mind, then that's called "Source Idealism". There's no reason to think that one is inherently more important than the other, so we can have them starting with equal sized parts of the probability space.

 

 

But theism isn't the only thing in source idealism. There are nontheistic source idealistic hypotheses. So we know that broad theism is less than 1/2. We're talking about something more specific than broad theism in the case of Christian theism, though. We're talking about the interactionist big 3-O God: Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omnibenevolent.

 

These theses are obviously fairly independent if not completely independent. There's nothing about being all powerful that implies that you'd be all good or even care about people at all. In fact, in humans at least, power tends to corrupt. So lets treat the attributes as independent. We've got Christian theism at less than (1/2)x(1/2)x(1/2)x(1/2).

 

So we've got our "prior probability" of theism as less than 1 in 16 quintillion. What sort of evidence do you have that can bring that up to a coin flip?

 

I should mention, however, that literally every possible observation is evidence against the existence of an interactionist deity. For any ontology, the P(observation|nontheistic version) is greater than the P(observation|theistic version) since for any potential observation, God could poke his finger in and make something different happen. That means, using the equation above by making a ratio [math]\frac{P(theism|observation)}{P(nontheism|observation)}[/math] we can see that the existence of the Christian God goes down and naturalism goes up with every observation.

 

So, before we look at the evidence, Christianity starts with a probability of less than one in 16 quintillion. Then we look at how the evidence works and see that it starts there and continually goes down.

 

So, short answer to the OP: I don't believe it, because it's unimaginably unlikely to be true.

[Air Between The Notes]

The Creator of the universe lives within me, it is an experiential relationship of peace that goes beyond all understanding that I can break by running with the ball myself rather than allowing His lead in my life which is really His as all of creation is His. Does He allow us to make choices for ourselves that can impact generations? You betcha! So what we do with that freewill is of great importance. The real stickler is that even the ability to accept His will for us is something He has the power over as Creator/Sustainer. Do we wrestle with such tension? For sure & I believe the main reason so many fight against His Perfection is as we are limited in our ability to comprehend total Perfection & so only are able to see the picture in a very limited scope which is complicated by soiling of the lens we look through due to our imperfection & finiteness.

[iNow]

The Creator of the universe lives within me

 

With this, I largely agree. Where we likely part ways, however, is in my conclusion that this existence (this "living") is only in your mind, essentially a figment of your imagination.

[Air Between The Notes]

Correct, the eternal spirit that lives forever & is placed within this electrochemical machine we find ourselves in with all of it's senses has a very strong tendency to override most peoples eternal spirit speaking out to them through their conscience & the worst thing we can do to our eternality is sear our conscience. Now if the spirit is awakened by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit? Then is when we really start to see life for what it is around us as the veil between this life (that is but a vapour rising off the water in early morning) & the eternal, starts to be pulled back for us to see beyond these physical senses of ours.