Discussion About The Existence of God On An Internet Forum

20 hours ago, D8veh said:

Hmmm! That's an interesting definition. It works well for natural life on our planet, but it has flaws. A simulation on a computer can meet that definition. What does requires energy mean - consumes energy, requires the existence of energy or what? What if some alien life could exist by trading entropy for energy? It comes back to we don't know what we don't know. In another dimension there could be something that exists on mana, or some type of field we don't have in the world we experience. When you're dreaming, are the beings you interact with alive?

God definitely exists. That's why we have a word for it. The question should be: What is god?

I think about when I play computer games. To the characters under my control or within the simulation, I would be their god. Their existence depends on me. I can control their environment, fortune, safety and health.

If you look back in your life, at some point, the world came into existence. Before that, there was nothing. How did you create it? "God definitely exists. That's why we have a word for it. " 

 We have words for many things which do not exist. Fairies, Goblins, Devils.

People have a capability to imagine things. Especially in times before we had other means to explain our world.

Our forebears invented myths to explain the bewildering circumstances they faced, life, death, the end of personal existence.

Homo Sapiens big brain did not always bring solutions; it also brought intellectual troubles that other creatures do not have.

Voltaire, the French philosopher made up a famous quote in the 1760s -

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

It is my opinion, that Voltaire hit the nail very firmly on the head.

As a youngster, I was brought up in a household where religion was never far away. I was a convinced believer until about the age of seventeen. By twenty, I came to the view that the personal God - the shadowy, wise and benign, human analogue, supposedly watching everything we do,and judging us, was a mythological construction. This came about mainly because I was starting to understand the scale of the universe.

At that time, I only knew about our own galaxy, but the scale of it, just blew me away. I realised the idea of some eternal, benign individual, existing in another dimension, and occasionally intervening in our own, was impossible wishful thinking.

The whole construction is almost designed to explain away the fact that there is no evidence at all for such a belief. God is supposed to be invisible, omnipotent, all good, an everlasting force. Nothing can touch him - and yet.... Nobody sees him, he is all good, but allows monstrous evil and pain.

'Ah - but it is mankind that brings the pain,' say adherents....

Then why does he not intervene and stop them?

'Ah - he has given his creation 'free will'. He can not intervene.'

But he is omnipotent. Why not?

We live in a universe with countless billions of galaxies. It is probably infinitely huge, each galaxy containing billions of stars.

Our Sun, is just one star - our planet just a speck of dust, with a sliver of an atmosphere, and a smear of ocean water.

This image taken with the deep field camera on the Webb space telescope, shows a field of view about the same as if you were looking through the bore of a narrow drinking straw. Imagine how many such pictures you would need to take to cover the whole of the space around the Earth! These smudges are not individual stars. There are only two stars from our galaxy in the image. You can spot them because they have diffraction spike artefacts on them. The smudges are galaxies, each of them containing hundreds of billions of stars - and this view is the view through a straw.

This is creation.

This is why I do not believe in a personal God.

We are an upright, smart primate with a brain that seeks closure. We want to know answers to big questions and we answer them with our best guesses. God and eternal life, are just two guessed answers to the questions:

'How did we get here?' and 'Where are we going?'

My answer to these - and like all human theories, it is just my best guess, is that we got here because of the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, and the answer to the second question, is that we return to the dust that we are fashioned out of.

That dust was created in earlier generations of stars than our own, through the process of atomic fusion, in which hydrogen is sequentially fused into heavier elements as stars age and begin to collapse, ultimately being blown into space by super nova explosions when massive stars come to the end of their lives. Ultimately, through gravity, that dust and gas collects into new stars, and into planets.

All the atoms in your body and mine, have passed through stars of earlier generations than we now see.

The dust of the planet passed atoms and molecules of oxygen, hydrogen, calcium and phosphorus into plants. We ate the plants, and we ate the animals that ate the plants, and this is how we grow from a three kilogram, new-born infant, into the 75 or 100 kilogram male, homo sapiens.

I say this is a guess, but it is more than that really, because it is based on empirical fact.

Empiricism - a paradigm which demands that belief is based on actual observation, measurement and testing, is probably the most powerful tool our species ever made. It is the foundation of science, and is what propelled us from the poverty, drudgery, unabated sickness, and misery of the pre-modern world.

The progress of our society over the last three hundred - perhaps four hundred years is entirely due to empiricism.

Look at the idea of God with an empiricist hat on, and you will not get far in finding him.