A simple reason why I believe in God

Awe.

Isn't it amazing how the more human advanced, the further away we are from spirituality? We become self-proclaimed creator of ourselves through evolution, we are vain beyond belief. Our practicality closes our eyes from seeing beyond the physicals.

As if debunking God gives a person the credibilty of a "learned skeptic", it really shows me how shallow people have become, really. To refresh your memory, some of the greatest minds since we become literate got their inspirations from God. Leonardo Da Vinci, Einstein, etc.

The more you really know and love, the more you realize, God exists. We are more than animals resulting from random evolution/ natural elimination. The more you hate and become jaded, the easier to deny Him.

Just because God "jilted" you, doesn't mean he has forsaken you, life on this planet is such a small part of being consciouss, we still have eons ahead of us as our consciousness will continue after death and beyond.

Proof? Proof to me what makes superstrings vibrates continually without an apparent enery source.

Faith, it's what separate us from robots & animals....

I totally respect what you say however I don't believe in God. My question to you is, if god does exist and I have lived my life as a non believer but been a good person. Where would this put me when i die?

Just a thought

reply to post by fiftyfifty


Apart from God.

So because you assume that people who don't believe in your god lack any spirituality, think there the creators of them selfs, are vain, shallow and loveless you believe in god.

Theres so many things wrong with that im not even going to say anymore.

I don't believe in any diety but I still have a strong sense of spirituality.
I came across this quote a while ago, it gets the mind thinking:
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. "When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. "
--Stephen Roberts

reply to post by chickeneater


i just have to point out that you made a mistake...

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
-Albert Einstein, in a letter to an atheist.

and the thing is.. i am a very spiritual person. i find spirituality in the mechanics of geyser... or in the cascading of light off of water particles..

you issued a challenge to atheists on superstrings as a way to challenge or lack of belief..
there is a problem in this... actually 2
1: superstring theory is currently in the realm of not thoroughly proven theory... so we don't know if it's actually true or not. there are competing theories
2: our inability to prove wouldn't lend anything to your position

oh.. and there are plenty of religious people that believe in evolution...

Originally posted by chickeneater
`
Faith, it's what separate us from robots & animals....

what
where did you learn that, in church i suppose
sorry but you have not changed my way of thinking yet
and if i do get to heaven (doubtful) i have a few questions i would like answered.
us non-belivers have no problem with people praying to A god but why do christains not just get on with it.

are you seperate from all animals or just most of them

Originally posted by madnessinmysoul
and the thing is.. i am a very spiritual person. i find spirituality in the mechanics of geyser... or in the cascading of light off of water particles..

Hmmm..spirituality...

This is a word that I've never heard you use until now.

MIMS, don't strip the meaning. You obviously intended to insert that word into your post.

I'm not making mountains out of mole-hills from this. I am intrigued as to why you would use the word: Spiritual?

Recant?

No I'm NOT making you a 'scarecrow'....setting you up for the fall.

This more than intrigues me.

Now we have to see the other side of MIMS. Spirituality

[edit on 15-9-2007 by TheDuckster]

[edit on 15-9-2007 by TheDuckster]

[edit on 15-9-2007 by TheDuckster]

reply to post by TheDuckster


spirituality, the sense i'm using it, is the same way carl sagan was spiritual. finding a humbling awe in a view of earth as nothing more than a pale blue dot.

i'm not stripping the meaning, i'm just using the word that most closely resembles the feeling i get from scientific understanding.

Originally posted by Edn
So because you assume that people who don't believe in your god lack any spirituality, think there the creators of them selfs, are vain, shallow and loveless you believe in god.

Theres so many things wrong with that im not even going to say anymore.

There are other spirits besides the Holy Spirit.

If I believe in no God instead of One, I'm saying I think everything that has ever existed, happened, etc, was created by nothing.

Nothing created everything that ever was is and shall be.

Does that make sense when you go over it in your mind?

A Nation of people can join forces and combine their collective energies to produce quite a bit -- thousands upon thousands of fighter planes, tanks, rifles, all sorts of technologically advanced tools of warfare. So a whole planet of people must be able to do even greater things.

And likewise, if people inhabited an entire Solar System full of Planets, they'd be able to do even greater. And if they had a Galaxy, they could do even greater. And you keep going on this path where does it lead, what is the maximum? Is that maximum something human beings can theoretically reach by combining energies on a monumental scale, or is that something beyond the physical reality that gets reflected into your eyeballs and fed back to them from your brain? something that .. doesn't register?

and in that place that doesn't register, do we know that there is time or not? and if there is no time there, does that not make it eternity?

I just think that if you say that there is no Creator God, you are saying everything in the physical should be theoretically possible for Human Beings to accomplish. Even Godly tasks. We should, in time, be able to become masters of the universe, to control the processes of life and death to where life only forms if we will it when we will it with the parameters we want it to have. And to control death to where things only die when we will it through technology and medicine that we've discovered and created for our well being and eternal refreshment.

And so one day, thousands of years from now, we could all be Gods, in that sense of the word. This is the conclusion I come to if this Universe is truly Godless.

So if the Universe is Godless, we all have the ability to theoretically wield Godly power. Considering the billions of years the Universe has supposedly existed, I think the Mathematics would lend themselves to the statistics favoring a civilization of intelligent life forming and growing over time to encompass an entire solar system and thus an entire galaxy, then other galaxies or portions of the Universe. And we can say that there would be God-like beings, how many? nobody knows.

So in a Godless world, there are Gods.

But thankfully I have faith that there is in fact JUST 1 God out there. That's because of our humbleness, what we can't do, what we know is "doable" but we cant do it. Sometimes we cant do it yet, sometimes we cant do it ever. And that puts us in perspective. At the opposite side of that perspective is God.

[edit on 9/16/2007 by runetang]

Originally posted by runetang
If I believe in no God instead of One, I'm saying I think everything that has ever existed, happened, etc, was created by nothing.

no, that isn't at all what you'd believe. you'd actually believe that everything has existed in some form or another forever...

Nothing created everything that ever was is and shall be.

Does that make sense when you go over it in your mind?

no, because you're clearly setting up a strawman. the rest of your post is a strawman as well, so i guess i'll just ignore it.

logical fallacies don't win arguments.

[edit on 9/16/07 by madnessinmysoul]

Those people who supposedly were inspired by God are not really accurate.

Leonardo Da Vinci lived in an age without the technologies and knowledge we have today. Most everyone relied on faith for everything, art not excluded.

You say Einstein got inspiration from faith when in fact that isn't true. He was born Jewish and then later rejected the idea of religion. In fact, he got his inspiration from his lack of faith. Faith answers questions that humans naturally ask, but he wasn't content with those answers. He believed faith left no room for speculation. Thus he rejected it and became the legend we know him as.

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

- Albert Einstein, letter to an atheist (1954), quoted in Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffman

reply to post by Paresthesia


it's a shame that we have to keep throwing that quote from einstein around... yet none of the theists seem to accept that they don't get einstein on their side.

einstein, secular jew
that means he was a jew only in culture.

Anyway, who CARES if Einstein believed in god? He didn't, but even if he did, the argument from authority doesn't prove there is a god. Carl Sagan was as brilliant as Einie; he didn't believe in god. Can the two of them cancel each other out now, so that I don't have to see this insipid attempt at an argument ever again?

Otherwise brilliant people fall for all sorts of snake oil all the time. It's part of being human and having a very imaginative brain.

reply to post by MajorMalfunction



Who cares about einstien if E didn't equal MCsquared???

Right, well I never claimed Einstein was devoutly religious.

But that quote does not say he doesn't believe, I think you people are adding a little too much extra meaning there. It says at the end of the paragraph that he was inspired by the structure of everything that exists, or as he put it, the structure of the world. That means he very well could've held the idea that there is a Creator, but he does not interfere in physical reality at all. His trademark would still be on his creations, and the way I read that quote is that Einstein was motivated to find that trademark if you will. Or to explain how everything came to be, kind of like how we go over this very topic so much looking for an answer.

So madness, you will argue against the concept of a God existing forever, or outside of time (forever in either case), yet you think all matter has existed forever? If matter can exist forever, a God could exist forever as well.

I disagree with you on the matter bit, I dont think all matter which exists has always existed. I'll show you why.

Take our current timeframe, look at the Universe. Then, rewind it billions and billions and billions of years. You will see everything, matter, getting closer together as we subtract the time. Eventually, it'll all pack itself into a "Singularity", which is what "Banged" at the beginning, spitting all the matter that has ever existed out of itself. One huuuuuuge, super massive black hole of sorts.

The problem is that the matter can't just "be there" in the singularity. Thats like saying God and the Angels are just "there" and always have been but have no explanation whatsoever for them. If we look at science, the nature of a black hole is that it will trap matter, keep trapping it and pushing it into the singularity of matter.

Well if all the matter which ever exists was all in one singularity at one point, why is it that matter even NOW is being sucked into various black holes while the larger pieces -- planets and heavenly bodies -- are moving further and further away, or expanding as they say. All the matter would have to implode back onto itself, then another bang would create another Universe, then it would get sucked back into the hole, then again, and again, etc. Plus, this means all the current black holes which trap matter would have to be sucked in as well, can black holes eat black holes? I dont know..

But this doesn't explain the origins of the Universe, nor does it explain the origins of the first matter. You can have that back and forth effect, expand and retract, but there still has to be a starting point. A starting point of all starting points, which before it, there was NOTHING. If you say No, there was never nothing, you're fooling yourself because there has to be.

If someone proved the accordion effect as I call it, this singular black hole spitting all the matter in existence from its' singularity, just to have it lose the battle and get sucked back into the black hole again, I would buy it. But even then! I would say, what happened before the VERY FIRST time. Theres always a first time, and before it, theres always nothing. Therefore there had to be nothing at one point, now there is something, and while all our somethings, matter, is now stuck here, it had to be created through a process or processes. Just like there is a DNA code in our cells that says "Build the human to this specification", there must also be something equal to DNA for the Universe, telling it to "create matter, spit it all out, expand, retract, repeat from step 2 onward" . Then when does it stop repeating though? The matter never goes away right?

Theres space on the kitchen counter where you're about to make a sandwich at, like you do every single day, with the same lunch meats and cheeses, and you do that in the same spot every single day at the exact same time without failure. Yet, there was a time that your kitchen and your home didn't even exist there! Sure the matter existed in the form of building materials, but if you rewind enough time, those building materials came off of trees which grew out of the ground in a space which there was yet again nothing. But anyway, when the home is destroyed, there will again be a time where no sandwich is made there and no kitchen will even exist.

Apply this to the Universe and you will still see that the building materials would need to be grown out of the ground, then made to form, to build the house. Even if its a house that is so advanced, it will always stand, for infinity, it would still need to be placed, built, and there-on it would stand. If our Universe will always exist, it still has a time far enough back where it didn't exist, even if it is currently in a perpetual state. There had to be a creation for the matter to exist.

[edit on 9/17/2007 by runetang]