[quote=“Bluefoot”]
By that logic, believing in God is just as stupid as atheism. They’re both just things people choose to believe. Neither is stupid.[/quote]
Yes but the athesit denies the existence of any god.And even the possibility of existing one.
God does not control what Humans do. They weave their own path, hence like Gehn said - Free Will.
and Raizen, I understand what your are saying, and it is quite an interesting point.
I think if there is a God or any other presence like it, we as a the human race are too young and unintelligent to truly comprehend its existence. Currently we assume too much.
[quote=“Scott”]
God does not control what Humans do. They weave their own path, hence like Gehn said - Free Will.
and Raizen, I understand what your are saying, and it is quite an interesting point.[/quote]
Yes that’s what makes us humans, we aren’t perfect and makes mistakes. Only GOD is perfect.
There must be somthing. Find it so hard to Believe that the diversity (Think that?s the word) of Earth and all it?s creatures was the result of one big bang. They must be something that created us. Otherwise why else do so few planets support life. Surely if the Big bang theory is right More planets would be like Earth
[quote=“Team Andromeda”]
Yes that’s what makes us humans, we aren’t perfect and makes mistakes. Only GOD is perfect.
There must be somthing. Find it so hard to Believe that the diversity (Think that?s the word) of Earth and all it?s creatures was the result of one big bang. They must be something that created us. Otherwise why else do so few planets support life. Surely if the Big bang theory is right More planets would be like Earth[/quote]
The universe is so vast we have only found a speck of all planets, and with the technology we have right now it is really hard to find planets similiar to earth that they could harbor life. I both believe in the Big Bang theory and anoother higher power, but I don’t think that is what created life.
And a theist denies the possibility of the existence of any other god or gods other than the one they choose to believe in, as well as the possibility that their god or any gods do not exist at all. How is that any less close-minded?
And Felix is right about us having no way of knowing how many other planets out there have life on them. Out of the (insert incomprehensibly huge number here) planets out there, we can see a grand total of 9, plus a few gas giants that we’ve been able to pick up near other stars.
As far as the diversity of life on this planet, well, we know beyond a reasonable doubt that evolution works, and we know that life has been around for a looooooooooong time (billions of years), so really the only leap we have to make is how it initially began.
I don’t think that any form of intelligent extra-terrestrial life exists (something that isn’t just religious dogma, but what many physicists also agree upon via the Anthropic Principle) - on matters of the probability of it occuring, you should bear in mind that whilst the void may be infinite, matter isn’t (otherwise the entire universe would just be one solid lump of material).
However, if I wanted to raise a purely academic point for the sake of argument, then really there isn’t any theological reason why the existence of sentient aliens would ‘disprove’ current religions. Take the instance of Israel being God’s chosen race in Judaeo-Christianity - now, there wasn’t any particularly special reason why Israel was chosen, and there were hundreds of other nationalities God might have selected to be His people. Yet the fact remains that Israel was given the specific purpose of propogating His faith, for whatever reason. If we extrapolate on this to an interstellar extent, then if we encounter aliens doesn’t that prove that humanity is the blessed race? We’re being given the specific task by God to extend worship of Him to other species just as we do to other nations today, with belief expanding like the blossoming of a beauteous flower on an awesomely massive scale.
For those of you who don’t know what that is:
http://www.anthropic-principle.com/
I don’t know much about the anthropic principle, but judging from that site, all it says is that intelligent life may be very improbable even on earth-like planets, not impossible.
Now then, let’s make an insanely conservative estimate and say that out of the approximately 400 billion stars in our galaxy, only our sun has a planet capable of supporting intelligent life. That’s a 1/400,000,000,000 chance that a star has a planet capable of supporting intelligent life.
Take a look at the following picture. This was taken when they aimed the Hubble telescope at a seemingly empty piece of sky and cranked the magnification way up:
If you look at the page on which that image originated: http://zebu.uoregon.edu/hudf, you’ll see that it represents 1 ten millionth of the sky, and that each object is either a galaxy or a proto-galaxy.
Based on pictures like these, astronomers have estimated that there are approximately 80 billion galaxies that are detectable by the Hubble. That doesn’t include all the ones that are too faint or far away to be picked up with our current technology, but we’ve already made one ridiculously conservative estimation, so what’s one more? Let’s say there are only 80 billion galaxies in the universe, and given our previous estimate, let’s say that each one contains a grand total of one planet capable of supporting intelligent life. Now, in order for there to be one and only one other planet with intelligent life in the universe, there would have to be only a 1/40,000,000,000 chance that a planet capable of supporting intelligent life does, and remember that’s assuming that our universe is much smaller than it actually is, and that there are far fewer planets capable of supporting intelligent life than there likely are.
P.S. Most of my numbers came from the following site:
faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part8/index.html
You can google William Keel if you doubt his credentials.
There could be similar groups in other planets for all we know.
Bluefoot : Christianity believes only in one God because it was the only one “shown to them”.And if christianity believes theirs his the one God that is because He said it so.Wheter you believe in God or not that would be a good reason to believe there are no other gods.
Atheists deny the probability of a revelation coming to be in the future.You see what I mean?Christians do too but with a reason.
Gehn:
Atheists do not believe in God, or any god, because the only evidence that exists for the existence of any god could very easily have been created by humans. If you choose to believe that the bible is the word of God, then that’s fine, but there are those who don’t wish to make that leap of faith, and there’s nothing wrong with that either.
Robert:
Sorry, I just realized something else about your post…
This is not necessarily true. An infinite set can be a proper subset of another infinite set. For instance, the set of all even integers (clearly infinite) is a proper subset of the set of all integers (also clearly infinite). So, the set of all space containing matter in the universe can be a proper subset of the set of all space (both empty and not) in the universe, even if both are infinite. However, this is probably a moot point, because the prevailing theory is that the universe is not infinite.
Raizen, really, what were you thinking? Was this one of those topics that seemed like a good idea at the time? There really isn’t any point in making a topic like this, people’s beleifs make up a very important part of their lives, no-one is going to change their mind about something that important based on a 10 line post they read on a message board. It also doesn’t help that your arguement was immessurably weak, religion is a thing based around faith, nothing short of MASSIVE turning point in someones life is going to change what they believe.
I’m not trying to start an argument with you, infact, I am an athiest myself, but I am because I quite simple cannot believe in God, and no one (as of yet) has been able to change my mind. When I think “God”, my brain simply replies “Does not compute”, and that is why I believe what I do. However, I have never, ever felt the need to, or even seen the point of, trying to convince anyone else that God doesn’t exist because a) it would be pointless, for the reasons above, b) people don’t need to believe the same thing as me, I am perfectly happy to surround myself with friends who all have their own philosophies or faithes and c) i’m glad that other people believe in God, and even wish I could myself, sometimes, because it gives people hope.
This topic really really serves no purpose. If you wanted to start a philisophical/theological debate, that would be one thing, but you would need to do so in a manner that encourages people to share their beliefs with others in a non-predatory manner. So this topic would fail as that sort of debate the second most people read the title. That means the only things that I could see this topic ever becoming is a massive flame war, and I would hate that to happen on TWOTA as it is such a great community.
Anyway, yeah. I’ll go back to lurking now.
I was arguing about this in philosophy class the other day. If any religion is right, then God is not perfect in any way, a perfect God doesn’t fit in with any religion nor does the belief in man having free will. I don’t think that the first argument works very well because justice is a very loose term and I personally don’t believe in it being that good.
I’m an athiest, BTW.
i kinda like things like these as i love to hear everyones opinions…
anyways, one thing that I stand firm on, and cannot see myself being proved wrong on, is that the universe is infinitely big.
I also belive that there is life elsewhere. We are probably not the only things tha are the result of God.
In my own opinion, God and the Universe have existed forever… but its all so complex. Sometimes I think about it and the amount of possibilities are amazing. e.g… what really happens when we die…
Well, we pretty much know that the Universe as we know it has not existed forever. It is expanding; we know this because of the doppler effect/red shift. And the nature of this expansion shows that at some point in the past all matter in the universe must have been located at a single point. This point would have been a singularity, so all of our theories break down at that point, and we really can’t say what happened before it. There may have been another universe before ours that condensed down into that point (implying a continuous cycle of big bangs/crunches). And you could interpret that as meaning that the universe, or at least the matter in the universe, has existed forever.
…bleh. Sorry about all the long posts. As you can probably see, this is a subject that interests me quite a bit, and I really like yammering on about it.
Bluefoot : So you don’t make a distinction between agnostic and atheist?
Explain to me how a perfect being can exist given that it’s properties are mutually exclusive? God can no more make a square circle than he can make a rock so big that he cannot lift or have proporties that are mutually exclusive.
We seem to be having a fairly civil discussion to me.
freewill is crap. we are not causes- only effects.
[quote=“Raizen1984”]
We seem to be having a fairly civil discussion to me.[/quote]
I suppose you are right, I just assumed that the title and the way that the thread started would cause it to deteriorate very quickly, but it seems I was wrong.
I believe we are the causes; but that would just be because I don’t believe in a god or gods.
I respect people’s religious opinions, but when people try to justify their actions with “but the Bible says” - especially when they’re not normally very religious - it can begin to annoy me.
[quote=“Bluefoot”]
Well, we pretty much know that the Universe as we know it has not existed forever. It is expanding;…[/quote]
I think you mean matter, or mean the universe as in planets are stuff. When I say universe, i mean… space
space cannot expand as far as I know since it is infinitely big