Our Place in the Universe

Very interesting. So this god of yours intentionally conceals the truth from those who do not already believe, so that you have to believe before you'll be be given any reason to believe.

Seems rather childish to me.

I never claim to know. I believe, very strongly, based on what I experience of the world, that there is no god. But I assert that nobody can know. Including me.

It's also common for religious liberals to agree that we cannot know, though they believe there is a god.

It's only the fundamentalists who claim to know something that cannot be known. Where I am uncertain is this: Are they deluded regarding what is and what is not knowable, or do they merely misunderstand the distinction between "knowledge" and "belief"?

The more we learn about the brain (through science) the more we understand that mystical experiences are connected to very real kinds of brain activity, which, however, have no connection to the outside world. These experiences are very easy for a susceptible person to attribute to divine intervention.

Some fundamentalists believe that belief itself is a divine gift, and that god merely decided in the beginning who he would give belief to (their own sect, of course) and all the rest of humanity would be blinded to the truth and swept into everlasting torment for the unbelief that they had no control over. Such religious constructs are intensely cruel, and the people who hold such beliefs are typically violent and cruel when they come into political power. Jesus told his followers not to quarrel among themselves, yet they have done little else from the day he died.

As for what caused the big bang, science does not yet know, and no scientist will claim to know. But it may well be knowable, and we may discover it some day, just as we didn't know until quite recently what causes earthquakes, and now we do. Science is constantly learning and discovering.

 

The trouble here is that you are using a different definition of 'literal' from Daniel. What means by 'literal' is that difference between the meaning and the words.

You will need to agree on a word before you will be able to communicate here.

 

Very perceptive...

The Bible says in Matthew 18 v 3 Unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the Kingdom of God. A child-like faith.

 

I agree... I think many of these arguments stem from misunderstanding the terminology.

 

On this point you are somewhat mistaken. Our Sun will shine on for 1 to 2 billion more years. Dinosaurs roamed the Earth 65 to 230 million years ago.

Humanity will not continue for one billion years. We will most likely die out, one way or another, but life will continue and there is time for new intelligent life to evolve without us. And without humans, Earth will very rapidly return to a clean, pure, unpolluted planet in 50,000 years or so. All the mercury will be out of the fish and the radiation we've amassed will decay and the minerals we've mined will deposit themselves back into the Earth. An entire new intelligent species and civilization can evolve, actually several more can, right here on Earth. Our planet has a long future ahead, and most will be without us.

We are a spec, even here on Earth. Kind of makes my new car seem pretty insignificant, when you think of it that way.

 

I never said humanity would survive for a billion years, or that life would end. I said that our end would probably be because we had turned the earth into a place we could not live. And then the universe (and I could have added the Earth) would continue on and will not even have noticed us.

 

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Its great!