Questions for Atheists

[Jackdaw]

Jackdaw, these are some good questions but most can't be answered to any satisfaction in a couple of sentences on a message board. If you had presented one or two of these I might have answered but throwing out a litany of challenging questions when you have only 38 posts on this message board just comes off as antagonistic. Even if you were given reasoned answers I suspect it wouldn't change your mind, because it is obvious you have already come to your own conclusions.  A person's faith rarely changes in the face of facts, otherwise it wouldn't be faith it would be science, so discussing these questions with you is pointless.

Yes, i too think i threw to many of them out. pick one you would like to talk about instead of trying to answer all of them. I was just trying to get a conversation starter. :-D

[Plu]

How do you explain the high degree of design and order in the universe if there is no God?

This is after-the-facts-reasoning, which doesn't work. You can't  ask "how is the universe perfectly fine tuned for X" when that fine-tuning is a requirement for us to be here to talk about it. Simply put, the explanation is that if it weren't fine-tuned for our kind of life, our kind of life wouldn't be here talking about it.

Imagine being born on the moon. That's a place not exactly fine-tuned for human life. What do you think would happen?

(The obviously correct answer is you can't be born on the moon because your parents would've died before they could give birth to you, as would their parents, etc, so it's a silly question because it starts with a paradoxical scenario.)

or you could just say it happened by itself.

You could say that, but it'd have about as much explanatory power as "god did it", so neither of those answers would really help anyone. It's much more useful if you actually understand why the question itself makes no sense, so that you can learn to ask questions that actually mean something.

[josephpalazzo]

I will answer only on those questions pertaining to my field.

-How do you explain the high degree of design and order in the universe if there is no God?

First of all "design" and order" are different conceptual objects. As to design, it implies a designer, and that is in itself an assumption.

As to the concept of order, in physics, we think of order for a system as its accessibility to information. Take a cube of ice. All the atoms are arranged along a lattice, each one vibrating about a more or less fixed point. It requires an equation with few degrees of freedom to describe that system. OTOH, the same atoms in a vapor gas are flying at random, with high velocities and often colliding with each other. To keep track of all that information is difficult. So we say that our knowledge of the system is less than in the case when these same atoms formed a cube of ice. Entropy is a measure of the inaccessibility to that information. So in a cube of ice, entropy is low (disorder is low); in water vapor, entropy is high (disorder is high). It turns out that there is more entropy (high disorder) in the universe than you think, and this disorder (the inaccessibility to information) increases as time goes on - we will know less and less about the universe as an increasing larger portion of it will no longer be accessible to us.

- What do you think caused the Big Bang?

There is no cause to the universe. Einstein's Field Equations in General Relativity (GR) show that space-time and matter must coexist. Prior to GR, one could think of a universe of matter devoid of space-time, or of a universe of space-time devoid of matter. GR nixed that once and for all.

Why is there something instead of nothing?

QFT shows that nothing never existed. There was always something. You can imagine that nothing could exist, but our theories say otherwise. So unless you can provide evidence that at one point in time there was nothing, which also would imply that space-time didn't exist, then you are just speculating on a state of the universe that never existed in the first place.

[Jackdaw]

(The obviously correct answer is you can't be born on the moon because your parents would've died before they could give birth to you, as would their parents, etc, so it's a silly question because it starts with a paradoxical scenario.)[/quote]
or you could just say it happened by itself.[/quote]

You could say that, but it'd have about as much explanatory power as "god did it", so neither of those answers would really help anyone. It's much more useful if you actually understand why the question itself makes no sense, so that you can learn to ask questions that actually mean something.[/quote]
Wouldn't it be easier to believe that a god made everything instead of it happening by itself? In that case that's probably why i don't have enough faith to be an Atheist.

[Hijiri Byakuren]

degree of design and order is all around you. If you at least cant see that then I think you are the ones ignorant. Il name a few like physics laws that this world needs to run properly, The sun and distance we are away from it is perfect! oh but that must have been an accident too. gravity, magnetism, all the way down to the complexity of DNA, and Cells, The human brain is very complex especially the females :). plenty of stuff and everything that makes up the universe makes it extremely complex.

This is called painting the bullseye around the arrow. It's like building an ATV, and then claiming that the rolling hills were perfectly designed for your ATV.

-How do you account for the vast archaeological documentation of Biblical stories, places, and people?
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-abr/abr-a008.html  and the Shroud of Turin, a king David existed http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/insideisrael ... Naysayers/

First of all, the Shroud of Turn was only made in the 14th century. Second, whether or not King David existed is quite beside the point. Charlemagne existed, but I doubt you believe much of the mythology surrounding him.

- Why is there something instead of nothing?
God
- What caused the universe to exist?
God

Hurr durr, goddidit lul.

- What do you think caused the Big Bang?
God, or you can keep pretending some how some way something helped formed it and made it go off in such precise ways to make it become what it has with the complexity of it by itself. Everything has a beginning so then I would ask you what made whatever caused the big bang if you even get that far. It has to have a start somewhere from and intelligent creator.

I don't know what kicked off the universe. And if I don't know, you don't know. You don't possess any special powers of perception that I do not. You do, however, have access to the same tools and methods as anyone else has that clearly show these events happened, regardless of whether or not your particular god out of thousands was behind it.

- on what basis can we make moral judgments? How do we know right from wrong?
We were made in the image of god. If you don't abide by him and have no morals as the bible tells you than that's how you can kill millions of people like Hitler did without a care in the world. What's holding you back if you have no morals?

Hitler is my favorite example of Christian ignorance. The man was a practicing Roman Catholic, and the only beef he ever had with the Holy See was that it wasn't located in Berlin. He's not alone, either: Genghis Khan may or may not have had some Christian beliefs, and a sizable fraction of his Mongol horde were quite definitely Christian; these very Christians had absolutely no moral qualms about lining up the populace of a city and executing the lot of them in the most horrible ways they could think of. And let's not forget one of the greatest Christian kings of all time, Charlemagne, whose forays into Germany would make modern dictators blush; his entire army carrying out these atrocities, of course, was also Christian.

Now does this mean Christianity is universally made up of merciless killers? Of course not. But being Christian certainly didn't stop these gentlemen from doing horrible things.

- Why do human beings matter?
Jesus died for us.

Glad to see you have such a high opinion of your own species. :roll: Not that I do either, but that's mostly because of people like you.

- How do we account for the almost universal belief in the supernatural?
yeah I guess everyone in the universe is just seeing stuff. How do you explain which craft?

I don't know, which craft is it you intend for me to explain?

[Solitary]

Here we go again---God of the gap questions for our lack of knowing everything that shows there is an intelligent designer. We don't have infinite knowledge and neither do you with your God. I live without knowing, but to not try to find answers to the unknown by saying God did it is lazy and stupid. To ask atheists to answer questions that you don't know either unless you evoke God is being arrogant and condescending.  :shock:  :P  :roll:  Solitary

[Plu]

Wouldn't it be easier to believe that a god made everything

Well yes. "God did it" is the ultimate easy answer. It's why so many people cling to it; it doesn't require you to think, know, learn, understand, whatever. You can just answer any complicated question "god wanted it like that" and you never have to think again.

The problem is that while it is definately a much easier answer than any other you can come up with, the problem with it is that it carries exactly no information at all. Which means that, while easy, it's also completely useless in that it does not allow the asker of the question to learn anything new. And the whole idea about questions is that once answered, they grant you new information with which to interpret the world.

Saying "god did it" is kinda like answering every mathematical question with the number 3. Sure it's easy, but you have to wonder if you're ever going to accomplish something if you keep using it.

[Jackdaw]

Why is there something instead of nothing?

QFT shows that nothing never existed. There was always something. You can imagine that nothing could exist, but our theories say otherwise. So unless you can provide evidence that at one point in time there was nothing, which also would imply that space-time didn't exist, then you are just speculating on a state of the universe that never existed in the first place.[/quote]
scientist have come to the conclusion that there was nothing before the big bang. Now all they are coming up with is a bunch of theories. even if there was there would be a beginning somewhere.

[Plu]

Scientists have never concluded that there was nothing before the Big Bang, as far as I know. They concluded they didn't know what was before the Big Bang because we have no way to measure anything from before then.

Also the idea that "there has to be a beginning" is based on a layman's understanding of the concept of time, because it's not a line and thus there's little reason to assume there has to be some kind of start to it.

If you have no clue about a topic, it's much easier to just say "I don't know" than it is to keep making up various claims that are false in order to pretend you have arguments against the scientific position.

[Jackdaw]

Wouldn't it be easier to believe that a god made everything

Well yes. "God did it" is the ultimate easy answer. It's why so many people cling to it; it doesn't require you to think, know, learn, understand, whatever. You can just answer any complicated question "god wanted it like that" and you never have to think again.

The problem is that while it is definately a much easier answer than any other you can come up with, the problem with it is that it carries exactly no information at all. Which means that, while easy, it's also completely useless in that it does not allow the asker of the question to learn anything new. And the whole idea about questions is that once answered, they grant you new information with which to interpret the world.

Saying "god did it" is kinda like answering every mathematical question with the number 3. Sure it's easy, but you have to wonder if you're ever going to accomplish something if you keep using it.

God makes sense. Believing somehow everything came to existence by itself does not make sense. the bible tells you to test everything and to hold fast whats good.How did human beings get here?Why is this world here? What is are purpose? Why are we different from animals? See God has an answer to all of this. Atheists will just come up with some silly non explainable way that doesn't make sense, or they will just say we don't know. If you were to come to believe in god what would it have to take?

[josephpalazzo]

Why is there something instead of nothing?

QFT shows that nothing never existed. There was always something. You can imagine that nothing could exist, but our theories say otherwise. So unless you can provide evidence that at one point in time there was nothing, which also would imply that space-time didn't exist, then you are just speculating on a state of the universe that never existed in the first place.

scientist have come to the conclusion that there was nothing before the big bang. Now all they are coming up with is a bunch of theories. even if there was there would be a beginning somewhere.

You mean theists have come to the conclusion that there was nothing before the Big Bang. The vast majority of cosmological models on the market don't. See for examples: Rheinhardt  ekpyrotic theory, Penrose conformal cyclic cosmology, and Smolin Fecund Universe Theory, to name a few.

[Hijiri Byakuren]

God makes sense. Believing somehow everything came to existence by itself does not make sense. the bible tells you to test everything and to hold fast whats good.How did human beings get here?Why is this world here? What is are purpose? Why are we different from animals? See God has an answer to all of this. Atheists will just come up with some silly non explainable way that doesn't make sense, or they will just say we don't know. If you were to come to believe in god what would it have to take?

[youtube:2du5tpiw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKReoE3IOkE[/youtube:2du5tpiw]

[SGOS]

Wouldn't it be easier to believe that a god made everything instead of it happening by itself? In that case that's probably why i don't have enough faith to be an Atheist.

That it might be easier to believe is irrelevant.  The discovery of science isn't about coming up with easy explanations.  It's about observation, testing, and verification.  Easy answers is the domain of religion, but easy answers don't work in scientific discovery.  Religion requires no testing and verification.  So sure it's easy to make religious claims about anything you want.  Every religious sect makes claims, often times contradicting other sects in the same religion.

Aside from believing in God, which after all is the primary purpose of Christianity, I don't see why accepting the authority of uneducated ancients about matters they had no understanding should be important, anyway.  Science is not about taking away your belief in God.  Why not just believe in God, without getting caught up in secondary issues that Bible writers made up stories about?  There should be no conflict with science here, unless you feel that science discredits God, which it doesn't.  Science doesn't try to disprove gods.  Religions deny various gods (without proof as they always do), sometimes your god, but science doesn't.

[Plu]

God makes sense. Believing somehow everything came to existence by itself does not make sense. the bible tells you to test everything and to hold fast whats good.How did human beings get here?Why is this world here? What is are purpose? Why are we different from animals? See God has an answer to all of this. Atheists will just come up with some silly non explainable way that doesn't make sense, or they will just say we don't know. If you were to come to believe in god what would it have to take?

All it takes for me to believe that the idea of god has merit is that you one (just one) prediction that can be made after answering a question with "god did it". And with that I mean a prediction that can be objectively verified. Give me a single experiment that I can perform that shows that by using "god did it" I can reasonably predict the outcome of any situation.

You know, something as simple as "gravity shows that if I drop an apple, it goes towards the ground". That's a simple, testifiable experiment that shows you that the theory of gravity can be used to predict outcomes of experiments. Give me a single case of "because god did it, you can X and it will cause Y." that doesn't rely (like all of them do) on secretly using the underlying actually real scientific systems.

That's all. One case where "my god did it" allows me to make a testable prediction of the outcome of a situation, and I'll re-evaluate my entire position regarding your god.

Can you give me something that meets this incredibly low burden of proof?

[PopeyesPappy]

-How do you account for the vast archaeological documentation of Biblical stories, places, and people?
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-abr/abr-a008.html  and the Shroud of Turin, a king David existed http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/insideisrael ... Naysayers/

The Shroud of Turin and King David. Is that the best you've got? If so I suggest you look into the criticisms of those claims instead of blindly accepting them as proof of your world view. The best available evidence puts the age of the Shroud at less than 800 years. Claims that the image was set in the cloth by a burst of UV light are know to be false because the discoloration exists only on the surface of fibers. If they had been generated by a single source of light they would be discolored through and through. Even if it could be dated to the 1st century there is no evidence it is an image of Jesus or that he was resurrected to save you from eternal damnation due to sins committed by people that didn't exist.

As far as David goes There are a couple of finds that might be related to a historical David. Might. However most scholars agree that even if he existed the account of his time found in the Bible is far from accurate.