Do you believe in God?

[Frogberto]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

You've misread my question. Where did the expanding and contracting energy come from?

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That's like asking "where does it go?" In an infinite universe, it's always been there, period. There's no "creation" moment with infinity.

[Alex]

There are theories for that, that so far we haven't the technology to devise observable experiments.

And if no matter how far you go back it requires an answer to the question "how did that get there" I don't see how it ultimately requires a creator because that just moves the question to "how did the creator get there?" So far, every time we've moved "creation" farther back it has been through evidence of another new physical process. I don't see where continuing that chain eventually requires a sentient process of creation.

It took millenia for mankind to realize that time is not a constant and the mathematical basis on which it is relative to perspective. Perhaps it will take another 15 millennia for someone to figure out the process by which the initial conditions of the universe came into existence. I still see no reason to simply assume a non-physical process.

[CoasterMatt]

Originally Posted by LSPoorEeyorick

Sure, we evolved. But how did the goopy water get there in the first place?

There's always George Carlin's theory of the "Big Handjob"

[CoasterMatt]

Do you think the same universe that brings us nipples on men, unidentifiable belly button lint and Strawberry Quik is gonna make ANY sense in the grand scheme of things?

[BarTopDancer]

I'm bringing Santa and the Tooth Fairy back into this discussion.

Being raised Jewish I was told that Santa didn't visit us, never that he didn't exist. Maybe it would have been better if my parents told me he wasn't real; maybe I wouldn't have spent my entire childhood wishing I was a different religion, but then I probably would have ruined it for the other kids.

The tooth fairy was very real until I caught my mom. I was 9 or 10. I always questioned and my mom always said the answer was what I believed.

After a certain age it's more about the magic behind the "person". Like Disney. Those characters are real. We go to see Mickey Mouse, Tigger, Malificent, Alice, Capt. Hook, not people playing them.

It's all about what you believe.

[BarTopDancer]

God is in the T.V.

[mousepod]

I know that there are things in the universe beyond my comprehension. When I'm talking with religious friends who I don't want to piss off, I call those things "God". Privately, I'm more interested in observable truths. I don't need God to teach me morality. When I first got sober through AA at age 19, I was aware that it was a religious program and that "GOD" played a big role. I balked at the idea until some old-timer in the program told me that many people think of God as "Good, Orderly Direction." Worked for me at that time.

If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to share my copy of "A Rough History of Disbelief," a great BBC miniseries written by and starring Jonathan Miller. I've also got Miller's accompanying "Atheism Tapes," unedited interviews that Miller conducted with Colin McGinn, Steven Weinberg, Arthur Miller, Richard Dawkins, Denys Turner, and Daniel Dennett for the "Rough History" series.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Look, I'm a scientist, I know all this. But I will always maintain that the whole of science holds true only if our fundamental perception of the universe is true. And that's something that, by definition, simply cannot be proven or disproven by observational science.

Again, all of this is taken, by me, as a purely mental exercise. I don't believe that our base pereceptions are wrong, but I'm fully cognizant that they could be. I do believe it's possible that what I observe is entirely a product of my own dellusional consciousness, that "reality" is something outside of my observational ability. Of course, I also accept that that doesn't particularly matter and that within the limits of what we can observe, everything you say is true. I don't live my life constantly qualifying everyting with, "Yes, but only if you assume the universe actually exists." But that's just as implicit as Alex's "In my opinion" reviews.

[Frogberto]

That sounds like an "argument from authority" to me.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Frogberto

That sounds like an "argument from authority" to me.

Huh? First of all, this isn't an exercise in logic. I'm simply stating what I believe. Second of all, argument from authority? Huh? What authority am I using? Are you talking about saying I'm a scientist? That was just to stop the scientific method lectures. I've read The New Organon. I'm well aware that science is not religion.