So, the ever lasting question of Gods existence will probably never be answered, because for both theists and atheists, no argument will suffice.
Personally, I do not believe in God, and I am an atheist, but my question is; If there is a God, why do atheists exist?
I grew up in an atheist home, with no friends or family who believed in God. If I burn in hell for not being a believer, is that fair? As opposed to a child from a family that goes to church every sunday, that just happen to be born into a christian environment. Thus, God, claiming to be all- knowing, would know that I would not be given a fair chance to earn a spot in heaven, and what kind of God would that be? Not a just, or forgiving one. Also, why haven’t christians, or any other religions for that sake, been successful in gathering mankind in one single religion? Why do people suffer in the world if there is a God? Why doesn’t he prove his existence? Why are there atheists?
If He does exist, He can’t set it up so that we know that He exists, otherwise, it screws up free will (THE reason for Creation IMNTBHO). So either way we don’t know, leaving 2 reasonable positions on the existence of God: agnostic-atheism and agnostic-deism and there are going to be reasonable people who will probably opt 50-50 for each since that’s what the actual odds are for either. It’s TOO poetic if God exists, but if He doesn’t, it just is.
Yeah I always found that fishy about Christianity:
either the fate of your everlasting soul is up to the roll of the dice,
or God was so kind as to actually deliberately set it up for your eternal torment.
Those are the only two options, and they’re both really ugly.
nah what? makes more sense that hell where everybody in heaven has to listen to their torment and gnashing of teeth for all eternity–unless they’re a bunch of masochists. =D>
Why would god showing himself to us remove free will? That’s a rhetorical question – I’m claiming it wouldn’t. Think about it:
Free will is not subsumed in a single belief – the fact that the sun rises every day means that we all believe in the sun and that it will continue to rise every day. We still have free will (at least in the naive sense we’re discussing).
People manage to not believe in things right in front of them all the time. People don’t believe in evolution or climate change or all sorts of things, for which there’s more than enough evidence to convince any sane person. If God literally appeared in front of millions of people in Central Square, and worked miracles that contradicted current laws of physics, there would still be plenty of people who wouldn’t believe.
I don’t think you can use “free will” to explain the absence of proof.
Because the religions screwed up by not maintaining a public incentive to pursue understanding but instead, presumed methods to maintain merely faith in their churches. Socialism was the error. And still is even in Atheism (also a religion as declared by the US Supreme Court). Human Secularism is merely a religion that touts that it isn’t one, “Perception is Reality”.
Once understanding of what was really being written about is restored, there will be no Atheists, but merely diverse adherents.
James, are you implying that, in some sense, some (or all) religions are correct, but merely misunderstood? If not, I’m not quite sure what you mean. If so, I think that claim has some burden of defense, since some christians (for example) are quite knowledgeable about the bible, and yet they (to my knowledge) have never touted a plausible interpretation that withstands rigorous scrutiny, and is anything more than faith based.
There are “interpretations” that withstand all criticism excepting Occam’s Razor, of course – but these are watered down versions of religion that most find unpalatable from either a religious or scientific perspective. This would include “god isn’t a person but rather an ineffable essence of life that permeates the universe”, and other similarly unfalsifiable and meaningless claims.
Currently, atheists seem to be precisely those people who can’t accept beliefs on faith alone, and need logical or empirical justification for those beliefs. Religion seems (almost by definition) fundamentally incapable of providing these.
I have thought about it …a lot. If you KNOW God’s watching, are you gonna do what you’d do if He wasn’t watching, if you knew/believed He wasn’t there?
Belief has nothing to do with it. We’ve been believing in revealed gods since civilization began. The question is what we’d do if we KNEW God was watching.
No, I completely disagree. We have to distinguish between removing free will and introducing constraints. Here’s what I mean.
Let’s assume we all have free will in the naive sense. Someone holds a gun to your head and says “give me your wallet”. Everyone (with some exceptions, yes, but very few) will hand over the wallet peacefully, rather than risk getting shot. This is NOT a loss of free will. This is a situation where you’re given a choice where one option is clearly much better than the other. You then make the choice using your free will.
If someone says “either I’ll give you $100 or you give me $100”, it would be the same; it’s a situation where virtually everyone would pick the same outcome, not because of a mystical loss of free will, but simply because one outcome is obviously better.
So if god says “hey dudes, FYI I actually exist, and if you don’t worship in me you go to hell”, all that does is inform the previously-non-believers that they have a choice in which one option is much better than the other. There would still be a few people who would choose not to worship god, but of course the majority would.
The loss of free will does NOT mean the introduction of constraints. To lose free will, you must no longer have the capacity to make choices. To introduce a constraint is merely to change the choices available to those with free will.
This sounds more like, If there is an Abrahamic God, why do atheists exist?
Since other religions are not necessarily as harsh with atheists. Some have no hell. Some of the other questions are rather broad, like the ones dealing with the problem of evil.
You are merely expressing the degree of folly that has been allowed over thousands of years. When people are taught for a thousand years that faith is all that is required, the understanding, understandably atrophies. And then any moron can come by and make them all seem like fools.
You hold rigidly to Logic, and you will have no choice but to come to understand that they were originally speaking logic, not myth. Religion is born of stubborn presumption, but that stubbornness was not born of foolishness, merely slight misunderstanding that grew with each generation. Science still has nothing on those who began the religions (and mostly never intended anything close to what is seen today). Science is well into being a religion itself. People do that to ALL forms of rational thought until no one would ever know it was ever rational at all. One day, if Man continued as he always has, no one would believe Science was ever anything but an old mythological system of superstitions to fool the public. Nothing has changed but the toys.
Exactly the contrary. They are those who have accepted the faith that faith is bad and evil, religions are evil, God is evil, churches are evil, Truth is evil, Evil doesn’t exist, and “only us non-christians are actually any good for the world”. Atheists are actually everything they hate in others. But then most often, so are the religious. Nothing has changed but the color of the flag.
The plating of the question is within the confines of arguement poised to disprove a divine existence by portrayal of the dilemma as inescapable from the strictest Judeo-Christian theological proposition not commonly heralded today by the progressive mass of adherents actively in their cognition.
Or to say it otherwise, this is the same dilemma as the quite explored and stripped apart free-will alleged paradox.
By that, I intend to say that presenting this query in the manner done is but a platform for propoganda and not truly a question of why atheism exists in human behavior biologically and psychologically.
If people are sick of Christianity, then why continue to address spirituality on Christian terms rather than their own?
By confining the discussion to Christian theology, each non-Christian is forfeiting their independence of ontology by submission to only that which immediately rejects the premise; which this act itself is not affirmative of one’s own ontology, but a critique of an ambiguous ontology without a unified face.
A far more provocative question exists in asking this same question independently of theological display.
I disagree.
There is you and there is me, for example.
There are several others that sense an interest in the exploration of our ontological motive and facilitation functionally.
So, if God wants to know who would worship Him of their own free will (free from threats, intimidation or other forms of divine pressure), He has to keep mum and out of sight. But if God stays hidden, we don’t know if He even exists. Doesn’t matter, because free will applies to our moral choices. Which of us decides to be moral without the threats etc., THAT is the question. Worshiping Him is not an issue since that idea was only started by shamans etc. who manipulate people with self-serving religious constraints.
God, ostensibly, wants to know how we function without said divine constraints.
Og and Nid are standing on the edge of a cliff enjoying the view. Og covets Nid’s woman, Phiphi . He could easily push him over the edge and go to Phiphi and comfort her in her hour of tragic loss resulting from Nid’s “accident”. As he’s considering his choice, he looks over his shoulder and sees God looking at him. His will to make his choice is still free, but not a free as it was–call it semi-free will. Instead of 50-50, it’s now 2-98. But from God’s perspective, the test is spoiled, neither He nor Og knows what Og would actually have chosen to do if he’d been FREE from divine influence–if he had TRUE free will.
I think there may be a lot of missing details here. There are many religions that are mutually inconsistent, or even internally inconsistent. To claim that these religions are correct but misunderstood would require paring down the tenets of the religions at least until these inconsistencies were removed. But then the idea that the religions are correct would no longer apply. For example, a core tenet of Christianity is that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, and that you have to consciously accept this sacrifice before you can receive its benefits. This is absolutely inconsistent with Buddhism, for example, which holds that enlightenment is the key to nirvana. If we get rid of these mutually inconsistent ideas, we end up with religions that are neither Christianity nor Buddhism.
I assume what you mean is that all religions share some common theme that is correct, but that a lot of the specifics of the religions are the “degree of folly that has been allowed over thousands of years”. I think this is a somewhat common sentiment, but
I think expressing this sentiment by claiming that “all religions are correct” or referring to “folly allowed over thousands of years” really misses the point, since to the vast majority of people, “religion” denotes both the core themes I am assuming you are referring to, together with the specifics I assume you are calling “folly”.
If you are going to claim that religions are all correct to some degree, or share a correct foundation or set of themes, there is obviously a great deal of burden of proof here. First you will need to precisely define what the common foundation is, since there are many possible shared foundations that one can assert. You would then need to argue that that set of themes is “correct”, either in a rational / logical sense, an empirical sense, or presumably in some “increases quality of life” sense.
You then say
I believe this is false as stated, simply because the specifics of every religion involve a great deal of myth. Jesus and his miracles, all the various creation myths of different religions, all the feats attributable to various gods, all lack any historical foundation. But I again assume you’re referring not to the specifics of any religion, but some common foundation. Again, your assertion is a fine one to make, but it requires both a definition of these common themes, and solid arguments that they follow logically.
There may well be advocates of science whose advocacy is faith-based more than anything. But in my experience these are very few and far between; much more common are those who deride science because it seems to conflict with their pre-existing faith. I think science is fundamentally not a religion for the following reason: science gives us palpable results that religion never has. Medicine, artificial limbs, methods of food production, cars, computers, airplanes, space travel. Of course some people claim that we’re worse off with these advances. I think this is a ridiculous claim that only people living in the blissful ignorance of a first-world environment can make. But regardless of whether or not science has improved our lives, the thing that clearly sets science apart from religion is that it works. Religions often attempted to predict the weather, or disaster, or other such things, always with no better results than random chance. Science does all these things remarkably well. Unless science changes completely from what it is now, I don’t think any reasonable person would ever think that science is truly a form of religion.
Even the idea of science as a religion is a little odd to me, because the fundamental tenets of science – which are more or less subsumed in the scientific method – is this.
Look for a pattern
Try to explain the pattern
Make sure your explanation is formulated efficiently
Test your explanation
If your explanation is successful, test it again in other circumstances. If it fails, formulate a new one.
This isn’t religion, it’s just a process by which you can figure out stuff that works. The reason science gives us results that work is simply because it’s based on the purely obvious idea of, find what works, and discard the rest. Science isn’t some mystical or faith-based collection of dogma – it’s precisely the approach that we should identify what works, and discard what doesn’t.
=D> 
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