Zone1 Why is it so tough to believe in God?

[rightwinger]

So you can't tell me how not believing in God has enriched your life? Is that because it hasn't?

How do I prove a negative?

I feel my life is enriched through marriage, children, friends and my favorite dog

 

[forkup]

1. Have you taken the time and effort (and it takes a lot of both) to seek and find God?
2. Have you talked face-to-face with people with personal testimony?
3. Have you researched and studied the evidence that is available in various places around the world?

Or, is it more likely you have made up your mind and you will not allow anything to change it? By the way, my purpose is not to change your mind. Some of the most loved people in my life are atheists and will remain atheists. What they better understand (and I'm hoping you will as well) is why people believe in God. It's usually because we've gotten past that 'man-in-the-sky' interpretation and are on to something more.

1. I was born and raised Roman Catholic. Broke with it when I was 17 so yes.
2. Yes, several times across 3 different religions. Found all their testimony epistemically unsound.
3. I have studied the arguments that are used by several religions to support their viewpoint. All of them are the same and all use fallacious arguments. I also studied history providing context.

 

[rightwinger]

Why do posters on this thread believe religious events that occurred thousands of years ago yet mock more recent religious events like Mormons and Scientology even though they occurred within a couple hundred years?

 

[GMCGeneral]

So Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus all have an equal chance of getting saved?

Everyone does. Bu4 not every way goes to G-d. Unless a person repents and trusts Christ for their Salvation, they are lost. And no religion, no amount of good works can save your soul.

 

[rightwinger]

Everyone does. Bu4 not every way goes to G-d. Unless a person repents and trusts Christ for their Salvation, they are lost. And no religion, no amount of good works can save your soul.

So two thirds of the population who do not believe in Christ are doomed

Why people are leaving religions

 

[BreezeWood]

Otherwise, belief in God would have died out long ago.

the desert religions are as political as they are false beliefs and have not been historical any more than mythologies having the same characteristics ...

there have always been diehard fundamentalists - atheists, it's just not attractive enough or a medium of worship to be as prevalent as religions, especially among those so easily captivated in illicit pursuits known as desert dwellers.

 

[forkup]

Almost everyone does those things. How has not believing in God enriched your life?

I'll take it.

Gaining knowledge enriches my life. Not believing in something without sufficient reason, I find is the best path to do that. So, I don't believe in a religion.

Your turn.

Everyone does. Bu4 not every way goes to G-d. Unless a person repents and trusts Christ for their Salvation, they are lost. And no religion, no amount of good works can save your soul.

How has religion "enriched" this person's life, because from where I'm sitting, he's taken it upon himself to sit in judgement and condemns, EVERYONE that doesn't believe exactly like he does and. An attitude that historically doesn't end well.

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

Magic (as a whole) is sleight of hand to deceive the public? The public is not deceived, but entertained.

Which just makes magicians more honest than clergy.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

What’s unlikely? You are you, so you can directly confirm whether the hypothesis applies in your case. That doesn’t invalidate the hypothesis, it just shows you might be an outlier.

Since I’m guessing you were born in North America, the statistical likelihood is that you’re some form of Christian. The exact denomination may vary by geography, but it’s extremely unlikely you’re Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist.

So tell me: which assumption is wrong here? Even if you personally don’t fit the pattern, look around you, the same reasoning holds true for the majority of people in your environment. That’s what averages capture: the general tendency, not the exceptions.

Claiming that outliers destroy the concept of an average is a misunderstanding of how science works. Science doesn’t deal in certainties, it deals in probabilities and the best possible explanations given the available data. Outliers don’t disprove a hypothesis; they simply remind us that likelihood is not the same as inevitability.

Perfectionism Leads to Paralysis

Academics, who preach this aggressive kind of thinking, know that they are crippling their students' minds. Constant petty objections create a vacuum that desperately needs to be filled. That's when the professors stick in their totalitarian answers. The gullible childish students are set up for the feeling of being rescued from scary uncertainty.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

It is all slight of hand to deceive the public

Pacifist Moses

That's what Jesus was trained to do. Most of the Hebrews thought he was a huckster and a carnival barker. At Medinah, they rejected Mohammed for the same reasons.

 

[forkup]

Perfectionism Leads to Paralysis

Academics, who preach this aggressive kind of thinking, know that they are crippling their students' minds. Constant petty objections create a vacuum that desperately needs to be filled. That's when the professors stick in their totalitarian answers. The gullible childish students are set up for the feeling of being rescued from scary uncertainty.

I don’t think recognizing that science deals in provisional explanations rather than absolute certainty ‘cripples’ anyone’s mind. Quite the opposite, it’s what keeps inquiry alive.

The moment you settle into the comfort of absolute certainty, you close the door to further questioning. That’s dogmatism, whether in religion or science.

So it’s not perfectionism, it’s openness. And openness prevents paralysis, because it keeps you moving forward instead of locking you into rigid answers.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

God is no more magical than the universe popping into existence not being created from existing matter. Both only seem magical to you because they both exist outside of your natural existence.

Dust from a Deity's Disintegration

If God existed at the Creation, then it wasn't from nothing. It was from God Himself breaking up into matter and energy.

You're also assuming that substances had a beginning. It's more likely that they were eternal and came in from another universe. If you can believe that God is eternal, with no beginning, then you have to accept the idea that everything else could have been eternal and not need a Creator.

 

[hadit]

I’m a student of history. What I’ve seen is not empirically verifiable evidence of God, but thousands of god-claims across cultures, mostly incompatible with one another, yet each asserted with certainty.

That makes the issue not just unfalsifiable in a scientific sense, but statistically implausible. With so many contradictory claims, the likelihood that any one is correct shrinks to near zero. Appealing to history doesn’t strengthen the case, it highlights the inconsistency.

Science is a human framework for testing truth claims. Attributing it to God shifts it from epistemology into theology, which misses its purpose.

As for your alien analogy: you’re right that unfalsifiable claims can’t be proven or disproven by science. But that’s exactly why science sets them aside, they’re hypotheses without evidentiary value until a way to test them exists.

Faith says you don’t need falsifiability to consider something true. Science says you do. That’s the dividing line, and it’s why your analogy doesn’t rescue the claim, it just highlights the difference. A difference that you still try to deny by trying to attribute the process you reject as somehow created by God.

You can use the phrase, but your use doesn’t meet its definition. ‘Justified conditional confidence’ requires tested evidence and conditional acceptance. The miraculous events you cite have never been empirically tested, so they’re not justified. And since you accept them as true without proof, they’re not conditional either.

As for your claim that belief brings more proof, what you’re describing is confirmation bias. Science looks for ways to disconfirm a claim; faith looks for ways to reinforce it. That’s the difference."*

My standard of proof doesn’t shift, it’s always testable, replicable, and falsifiable. If a claim doesn’t meet that, I don’t accept it as true. That doesn’t mean it’s disproven; it means I honestly say ‘I don’t know’ rather than claim certainty where none exists.

And yes, I can’t disprove God. But I can disprove specific god-claims when they make assertions that fall under the scientific method, claims about history, nature, or miracles that should leave evidence but don’t. Most religious claims I’ve encountered fall into that category.

That’s not shifting proof; that’s applying the same standard consistently.

I don’t know, because no one has ever produced a testable, falsifiable way to verify the existence of a god. That’s why I don’t claim certainty either way.

What I do say is that specific god-claims fail when they make assertions that should leave evidence but don’t. And it’s not on me to prove or disprove them, the burden of proof always lies with the one making the claim.

That’s not evasion; it’s consistency. I apply the same evidentiary standard to every claim, whether religious or not.

Ask me to disprove Roman Catholic dogma or Islamic dogma and I can succeed, because those traditions make specific claims that can be tested against evidence. Ask me to disprove a vague ‘man in the sky’ concept, not so much, because vagueness is unfalsifiable by design. That’s the difference: concrete claims can be scrutinized, abstractions can’t.

And your insistence that God be proven by means that man can control negates His being a sovereign, independent, intelligent being that cannot be contained in a man-made box and treated like a lab experiment. Trying to force proof of God into a scientifically verifiable and replicable box simply can never be done. In fact, if He COULD be placed in such a box, He would cease to be God and would merely be another physical phenomenon. Man is always seeking to reduce God to such simple terms and can never do so.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

Don't shortchange yourself. God is transcendent. Which means the only evidence anyone will ever have for God's existence - besides personal revelation and the historicity of Jesus Christ - is the indirect evidence from what God created.

It's comical when anyone acts like they expect that there is something more. It's considerably more comical than their arguments that they can't prove a negative or that God can't exist because bad things happen to good people or that God can't exist because God is an immoral meanie. All of which are comical in and of themselves and reveal their dismal level of intellect.

Pathetically Childish Imaginary Father-Figures

Insulting other people's intelligence doesn't prove that you are smart. It only shows a desperate need to feel that you're superior to others by pretending that you are the right-hand man of some imaginary Omniscience.

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

And your insistence that God be proven by means that man can control negates His being a sovereign, independent, intelligent being that cannot be contained in a man-made box and treated like a lab experiment. Trying to force proof of God into a scientifically verifiable and replicable box simply can never be done. In fact, if He COULD be placed in such a box, He would cease to be God and would merely be another physical phenomenon. Man is always seeking to reduce God to such simple terms and can never do so.

Magic can neither be proven nor disproven.

That's kind of the point.

 

[hadit]

Magic can neither be proven nor disproven.

That's kind of the point.

Which is fine. If you want to prove God's existence with science, you are comfortably never going to prove He either exists or does not exist, but that is a very narrow way to view the entirety of life, our surroundings and the universe as a whole.

You are not a true atheist at most you are an agnostic.

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

If you want to prove God's existence with science,

Can't happen. Inherently.

You are not a true atheist at most you are an agnostic.

All agnostics are atheists. "Gnostic atheist" is the special case of atheism, by which someone claims to know that no gods exist.

Like how a square is a special case of a rectangle.

Yes, I am an agnostic atheist.

 

[hadit]

Can't happen. Inherently.



All agnostics are atheists. "Gnostic atheist" is the special case of atheism, by which someone claims to know that know God's exist.

Like how a square is a special case of a rectangle.

Yes, I am an agnostic atheist.

I believe we understand each other.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

The fact that belief in a power greater than man has existed since the beginning of man, in overwhelming numbers, in every society ought to give you a clue that it's hardwired into man. So... if we take the Darwinian approach, it should be clear to you that belief in God provides a functional advantage that atheism does not have. Otherwise, belief in God would have died out long ago. I'm sure that even with your limited intellect you could figure out what those functional advantages might be.

We Won't Evolve If We Dissolve

Death Wishes and Inferiority Complexes are also part of human nature. Pride opposes illegitimate authority; tyranny magnifies certain human weaknesses. Not everything we're programmed with is good for us.

 

[forkup]

And your insistence that God be proven by means that man can control negates His being a sovereign, independent, intelligent being that cannot be contained in a man-made box and treated like a lab experiment. Trying to force proof of God into a scientifically verifiable and replicable box simply can never be done. In fact, if He COULD be placed in such a box, He would cease to be God and would merely be another physical phenomenon. Man is always seeking to reduce God to such simple terms and can never do so.

If God can’t be tested or verified, then He has zero explanatory value. That makes Him useless as a way to truth or reality. I could replace God with dreams or hallucinations and get the same value, delusions that help people cope. And also makes them tribal in the process.

Slice it, dice it, turn it upside down, it’s the same: you’re advocating for something indistinguishable from mass delusion. With all the dangers that entails. That’s special pleading, and it collapses under its own weight.