Recently I’ve been doing that most pointless of things – arguing on the internet. It is a fault of mine that I cannot abide sitting idly by while someone lies or misinforms. And so, I entered one particularly long debate on everything from Yahwehs existence to evolution. I even had to sit through some ridiculous Youtube videos of muslim clerics asking “if monkeys turned into humans, why are there still monkeys?” This type of foggy, ignorant thinking abhors me enough to continue an argument. Finally, after monotonously explaining all of these laws, processes and theories, we came to the point where the Creationist had become a Pantheist – believing in nothing specific, but rather in some all powerful force. This is the denouement of that argument.
TruthAboutJesus said:
Who created these cohessive forces between the molecules? who created the attraction among droplets? Who created these forces? who tells them to do so? Again you will come with some lame source, but then I will ask who created that reason. Who created postive and negtive charges on atoms? Whatever effect you will tell me, you will have to reach its final cause. All these things came from nothing? Did you ever place yourself out of this absured thought and gave a different angle to your thought? Did all things came from nothing?
The forces of nature, or the thing which you call the ‘laws of physics’ or the things which you call ‘forces of attraction and repulsion’ .. That is what we call the order of God. You people are simply aware of ‘natural phenomenon’ but you simly dont accept there exists something called ‘nature’ . That nature we call as God.
No need of lame excuses. It seems to me Atheism has become a cult or has evolved to be a religion that people trash anything which does not fit their mind.
GavinZac said:
If you want to call the laws of physics or quantum mechanics “God”, so be it. I don’t really have a problem with that, and it would be the position of some scientists.
If you did insist on asking all those questions, it would come eventually to the point of singularity. At this point, our laws of physics and quantum mechanics stop behaving as we would observe anywhere else in the world. We thought we’d never know about it, and a lot of people were content to then say – ok, so maybe this is where that god chap is, he’s before the singularity. Of course, this is rather pointless – a god who has not intervened in the universe in billions of years? Who simply flicked a tiny, massive dot and watched it expand? It seems pretty damn egotistical to not only assign this mystical force a form of humanity, but also to claim that he the god of one particular desert tribe from 3000 years ago! It would in fact negate the entire bible, given that the flood would never have happened, neither version of genesis would have happened… Is that the god you want to worship?
Fortunately, even that little glimmer of hope for religion is now being dusted off by that most precious tool of science – further discovery. Religion can never discover something new, mankind will keep finding new answers and religion will keep adjusting as best it can until it is finally unable to claim anything. The world is flat, space is an ocean, the world sits on top of a turtle, the earth is the centre of the universe, evolution, the world is billions of years old… religions and the church have “changed their mind” many, many times. Which makes me question, are they even the same religion anymore?
The reason I say that little glimmer of hope is fast disappearing is one of our newer scientific fields the study of black holes, and nebulae. It turns out, that we have working models of the beginning of the universe, right here in our galaxy! A black hole is a (much) smaller example of the physics that would have existed at singularity. It is so dense, that its gravity traps everything, even light and time. It is ETERNAL DARKNESS. What a fantastic prospect eh? I tell you, it gives me a wonderful feeling that we can even know this, stuck here on our rock. And then… let there be light! As you would say. We have discovered nebulae – spinning stars which spit out vast quantities of energy, matter and light. To watch a ball of light in the sky creating a new solar system – that is a wondrous experience. Creation! It sure beats sitting at a pew denying any of this happens.
As we study these phenomenon, we will grow to know more and more about that point of singularity. We can now say things like “time doesn’t exist at singularity”. Isn’t that incredible? Hawkins describes it as “time is finite, but doesn’t have any boundaries”. We live in one giant ball of space time – there is no “before” singularity. At the “edge” of space and time, everything is a singularity. We stop thinking of time as linear – we now know that space and time are intrinsically linked so that there in fact, was no “before” singularity, and no moment of creation. Everything can be described as a circle, no beginnings, no end. That my friend, is fantastic knowledge that fills me with more wonder than any claim that one particular god likes me more than someone else. And that brings me to your final claim – that atheism is becoming a cult, or religion.
First off – its not. A religion is a faith based belief of something outside the law of physics that is a higher intelligence than ourselves.
Atheism is the lack of this belief. Blond, brown and black are hair colors. Bald is not. It is the absence of a hair color. And so, this is atheism – a lack of belief in that which can not be proved, or has been disproved.
The two reason atheism is growing, why it is becoming vocal, are:
Scientific discovery and because the dangers of religious teaching are becoming more and more apparent. Until recently, people with no particular faith generally considered religion to be harmless. It gives some people hope, and we’ve stopped killing each other over it… right? Well… The spread of AIDS/HIV and massive over population (there are twice as many people in the world now as there were 100 years ago – and there will be twice as many in another 100 years… who will feed them?) in Africa is blamed on Catholic opinions on contraception. We all know about the hatred spread by some sects of religion, and I’m sure you will tell that terrorists are not real Islamists, or that the troubles in Northern Ireland are purely secular, or some excuse like that. But tell me – the terrorists beliefs are that they are special, they know what god wants and they are giving it to them in an attempt to attain something supernatural. They think they are right, and we are wrong. They live in a world where so many are willing to believe that the supernatural can happen – by allowing these fake, false ideas to exist, people like you give them the platform to abuse these imagined supernatural callings. Indeed, your own religion abused these ideas not so long ago, and it is with a certain sense of irony that you now ask “god” for protection against what you were before science opened your eyes so very slightly.
I was raised as a Catholic. It is not by someone preaching hate or lies that I have slowly lost that belief given to me when I was too young to doubt it. It is by opening my mind and learning about this wonderful universe, rather than limiting myself with fairy tales and false hope, that has given me the joy of know that indeed, we do have a significance in the universe – not that some being chose us to represent him on a particularly soggy planet, but that the chain of events that has led to me being here to type on this laptop is so unimaginably complex and seemingly far fetched, and yet entirely to be expected.
“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, 1954.
