There are no good reasons to think atheism is true, and many reasons to think it is false. Chalky, are you 100% positive God does not exist? Take a moment to read the question again. If someone asks me if Aliens exists, i would simply say I do not know, or i do not think there is because of the lack of evidence. Therefore, at best, your position can be agnosticism. You are not 100% sure there is no God, you do not know for certain, but you lean that there isn't one based on your thinking. However, this still leaves open the possibility of God existing, just that it has not been proven to be convincing enough to you. At this point, it is important to examine your arguments against the existence of God. Arguments that would have to prove the possibility of God existing to be impossible based on reason, and the fact that the existence of God would be a contradiction to itself. If you can prove to me that God existing would be a contradiction, then this would prove atheism to be true. So, I would like to hear your arguments on why you think God cannot exist.
I will examine the arguments you present and prove that there is no good reason to think atheism as a worldview is true.
Before you can find out if a certain God exists, you will have to look at the arguments to figure out if God exists at all. Remember, we may not be able to comprehend how God knows all truths or how he created the world, but we can understand that such tasks are not impossible for an infinite being like Him. Just as we may not fully understand how a nuclear reactor works because we are not nuclear engineers, but the facts that are provided to us by them allow us to have a basic understanding.
Proving God's existence is like shorthand for saying that the balance of evidence in favor of God's existence outweighs the evidence against God's existence. If we think of going to court, we are able to prove someone guilty of a crime by using cumulative pieces of evidence that point toward a particular verdict. There is no long mathematical equation, instead there are pieces of evidence, and while no one piece of evidence proves one's guilt, taken all together, it may very well accomplish this task. This is how we explain the existence of God.
If people believe there faith to be true, they should have no problem sharing it with others. Afterall, sharing it could effect somebody elses eternal destiny, how much would we have to hate somebody not to prostelytize? how much would a believer have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?? Chalky, being open to what is true, as opposed to what we want to be true is important.
You may want emperical proofs, that can be detected with your five senses. However, things can exist without empirical evidence. For example, the existence of other minds is not proven by direct scientific evidence alone. The mind, which is a collection of thoughts, cannot be observed like a brain. I can't observe your thoughts, I must assume that you have them because i do. Second, the existence of moral truths, such the fact that it is wrong to cause suffering just for the purpose to increase the cause suffering cannot be proven scientifically. All science does is tell us what suffering is and how it occurs. However, science does not tell us if suffering should not be caused. We cannot restrict evidence of God to be empirical evidence. The fact that objective moral truths exists indicate that it must have come from a moral law giver outside space and time.
Have you read up on how unlikely it is for us to be conversing right now? The fine tuning design of our universe? The universe with constants and conditions that permit life rather than prohibit life is extremely unlikely. In order for evolution to have taken place, the fine tuning of the initial constants and conditions had to be incromprehensibly fine tuned. If you say evolution explains design, well once again, what explains the extremely unlikelines of a universe where the evolution of life is even possible? British astronomer Martin Rees identifies six universal physical constants and conditions that if they were even altered by a fraction of a percent, it would eliminate any possibilty of intelligent life evolving in our universe. We can look at the gravatational force, and its weakness explained by Rees which proves that gravitiy is 10 to the 36th power weaker compared to other forces tihin atoms. If gravity were a tiny bit stronger, none of us would be here at SBR or alive. If it were stronger, stars would burn out very quickly and planets would be tiny. Any life forms on thos planets smaller than an ant would be crushed. "only the middle ground, where the expansion and the gravational strength balance to within one part in 10 to the 15th power at once second after the big bang, allows life to form. In the first seconds of the universe, matter could have not differed by more than one part in one quadrillion or else it would have collapsed. Now as for the expansion rate of the universe, Alexander Vilenkin writes "A tiny deviation from the required power results in a cosmological disaster, such as the fireball collapsing under its own weight or the universe being nearly empty...This is the most notorious and perplexing case of fine-tuning in physics. When we look at the arrangement of thermal energy just after the big bang, Oxford Physicist Roger Penrose calculated that the odds of our universe having such a low disorder at the begining of time are 1 in 10 to the 1oth to the 123th power. This number is so big that the zeroes would stretch across the galaxy. You would be more likely winning 10,000 lotteries in a row and get struck by lightening everytime you won than finding a universe with low disorder at its begining. Out of all the possible universes it is much more likely that there would be no life at all and the fact that our universe accomodates life against such incredible odds requires an explanation. It seems that the universes immense size and emptiness is actually required for intelligent life to develop via Darwinian evolution. If we played poker, and I won 10 Royal Flushes in a row, would you say "well, Seaweed is lucky today and it happened by chance" or would you suspect that I was designing the cards a certain way for victory and there has to be someone behind it? Just like the poker game, our knowledge of the universe points to someone behind it. If you wouldn't accept luck in that case, why would you accept it for the extreme unlikeness of a universe that could support intelligent life?
Fine-tuning is just one thing you need to look at, as are objective moral truths, the universe does not have to exist, as well as the first cause argument and many others.
I won't continue right now but I'll let you try to prove Atheism to be the more rational reason that God,and prove that the existence of God is impossible, a contradiction, and that if God existed the universe would not look like it is.
I will examine the arguments you present and prove that there is no good reason to think atheism as a worldview is true.
Before you can find out if a certain God exists, you will have to look at the arguments to figure out if God exists at all. Remember, we may not be able to comprehend how God knows all truths or how he created the world, but we can understand that such tasks are not impossible for an infinite being like Him. Just as we may not fully understand how a nuclear reactor works because we are not nuclear engineers, but the facts that are provided to us by them allow us to have a basic understanding.
Proving God's existence is like shorthand for saying that the balance of evidence in favor of God's existence outweighs the evidence against God's existence. If we think of going to court, we are able to prove someone guilty of a crime by using cumulative pieces of evidence that point toward a particular verdict. There is no long mathematical equation, instead there are pieces of evidence, and while no one piece of evidence proves one's guilt, taken all together, it may very well accomplish this task. This is how we explain the existence of God.
If people believe there faith to be true, they should have no problem sharing it with others. Afterall, sharing it could effect somebody elses eternal destiny, how much would we have to hate somebody not to prostelytize? how much would a believer have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?? Chalky, being open to what is true, as opposed to what we want to be true is important.
You may want emperical proofs, that can be detected with your five senses. However, things can exist without empirical evidence. For example, the existence of other minds is not proven by direct scientific evidence alone. The mind, which is a collection of thoughts, cannot be observed like a brain. I can't observe your thoughts, I must assume that you have them because i do. Second, the existence of moral truths, such the fact that it is wrong to cause suffering just for the purpose to increase the cause suffering cannot be proven scientifically. All science does is tell us what suffering is and how it occurs. However, science does not tell us if suffering should not be caused. We cannot restrict evidence of God to be empirical evidence. The fact that objective moral truths exists indicate that it must have come from a moral law giver outside space and time.
Have you read up on how unlikely it is for us to be conversing right now? The fine tuning design of our universe? The universe with constants and conditions that permit life rather than prohibit life is extremely unlikely. In order for evolution to have taken place, the fine tuning of the initial constants and conditions had to be incromprehensibly fine tuned. If you say evolution explains design, well once again, what explains the extremely unlikelines of a universe where the evolution of life is even possible? British astronomer Martin Rees identifies six universal physical constants and conditions that if they were even altered by a fraction of a percent, it would eliminate any possibilty of intelligent life evolving in our universe. We can look at the gravatational force, and its weakness explained by Rees which proves that gravitiy is 10 to the 36th power weaker compared to other forces tihin atoms. If gravity were a tiny bit stronger, none of us would be here at SBR or alive. If it were stronger, stars would burn out very quickly and planets would be tiny. Any life forms on thos planets smaller than an ant would be crushed. "only the middle ground, where the expansion and the gravational strength balance to within one part in 10 to the 15th power at once second after the big bang, allows life to form. In the first seconds of the universe, matter could have not differed by more than one part in one quadrillion or else it would have collapsed. Now as for the expansion rate of the universe, Alexander Vilenkin writes "A tiny deviation from the required power results in a cosmological disaster, such as the fireball collapsing under its own weight or the universe being nearly empty...This is the most notorious and perplexing case of fine-tuning in physics. When we look at the arrangement of thermal energy just after the big bang, Oxford Physicist Roger Penrose calculated that the odds of our universe having such a low disorder at the begining of time are 1 in 10 to the 1oth to the 123th power. This number is so big that the zeroes would stretch across the galaxy. You would be more likely winning 10,000 lotteries in a row and get struck by lightening everytime you won than finding a universe with low disorder at its begining. Out of all the possible universes it is much more likely that there would be no life at all and the fact that our universe accomodates life against such incredible odds requires an explanation. It seems that the universes immense size and emptiness is actually required for intelligent life to develop via Darwinian evolution. If we played poker, and I won 10 Royal Flushes in a row, would you say "well, Seaweed is lucky today and it happened by chance" or would you suspect that I was designing the cards a certain way for victory and there has to be someone behind it? Just like the poker game, our knowledge of the universe points to someone behind it. If you wouldn't accept luck in that case, why would you accept it for the extreme unlikeness of a universe that could support intelligent life?
Fine-tuning is just one thing you need to look at, as are objective moral truths, the universe does not have to exist, as well as the first cause argument and many others.
I won't continue right now but I'll let you try to prove Atheism to be the more rational reason that God,and prove that the existence of God is impossible, a contradiction, and that if God existed the universe would not look like it is.
